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Guatemala’s Bol de la Cruz Found Guilty

Today Guatemala’s former national police chief Colonel Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1984 kidnapping and disappearance of 27-year-old student union leader Fernando Garcia, who was last seen when officers detained him outside his home. Along with Bol de la Cruz, former senior police officer Jorge Gomez was also tried; he received a sentence of 40 years in prison. That verdict comes in part because of testimony this month by HRDAG’s Patrick Ball, who served as an expert witness and presented data analysis done with colleague Daniel Guzmán to assess the flow of thousands of ...

Matching the Libro Amarillo to Historical Human Rights Datasets in El Salvador

Patrick Ball (2014). A memo accompanying the release of The Yellow Book. August 20, 2014. © 2014 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.[pdf español]


Benetech Human Rights Program and Corporación Punto de Vista Issues Report on Sexual Violence in Colombia


Selection Bias and the Statistical Patterns of Mortality in Conflict.

Megan Price and Patrick Ball. 2015. Statistical Journal of the IAOS 31: 263–272. doi: 10.3233/SJI-150899. © IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Gaza death toll 40% higher than official number, Lancet study finds

“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.

Ball told AFP the well-tested technique had been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”


Experts Greet Kosovo Memory Book

On Wednesday, February 4, in Pristina, international experts praised the Humanitarian Law Centre's database on victims of the Kosovo conflict, the Kosovo Memory Book. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted in the article that appeared in Balkan Transitional Justice. HLC’s work won praise from Patrick Ball, from Human Rights Data Analysis Group and from Michael Spagat, professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who have examined and analysed the database. Ball, with 24 years of experience in databases and statistics of human rights, said that the HLC’s database had enormous quality and marked it out as among the ...

Data Science Symposium at Vanderbilt

Patrick Ball keynoted the Data Science Symposium at Vanderbilt University.

Multiple Systems Estimation: The Basics

Multiple systems estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations. In this blogpost, and four more to follow, I’ll answer both conceptual and practical questions about this important method. (In posts to follow, questions that refer to specific statistical procedures or debates will be marked, "In depth.") (more…)

Big Data, Selection Bias, and the Statistical Patterns of Mortality in Conflict

Megan Price and Patrick Ball (2014). SAIS Review of International Affairs © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in SAIS Review, Volume 34, Issue 1, Winter-Spring 2014, pages 9-20. All rights reserved.


Evaluation of the Database of the Kosovo Memory Book

Jule Krüger and Patrick Ball (2014). An analysis accompanying the release of the Kosovo Memory Book. December 10, 2014. © 2014 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Statistics and Slobodan

Patrick Ball and Jana Asher (2002). “Statistics and Slobodan: Using Data Analysis and Statistics in the War Crimes Trial of Former President Milosevic.” Chance, vol. 15, No. 4, 2002. Reprinted with permission ofChance. © 2002 American Statistical Association. All rights reserved.


Rapid response: Civilian deaths from weapons used in the Syrian conflict

Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, Jay D. Aronson, and Christopher McNaboe. 2015. BMJ (29 September): 351. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h4736. © The BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. All rights reserved. Open access.


A geeky deep-dive: database deduplication to identify victims of human rights violations

In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think. Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We want to identify and link all the records that refer to the same victims so that each victim is counted only once, and so that we can use the structure of overlapping records to do multiple systems estimation. Merging records that refer to the same person is called entity resolution, database deduplication, or record linkage. For definitive overviews of the field, see Scheuren, Herzog, and Winkler, Data Quality ...

Five Questions with Patrick Ball


Data-Driven Efforts to Address Racial Inequality

From the article: “As we seek to advance the responsible use of data for racial injustice, we encourage individuals and organizations to support and build upon efforts already underway.” HRDAG is listed in the Data Driven Activism and Advocacy category.


The Untold Dead of Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines Drug War

From the article: “Based on Ball’s calculations, using our data, nearly 3,000 people could have been killed in the three areas we analyzed in the first 18 months of the drug war. That is more than three times the official police count.”


Technology His Launchpad for Literacy, Human Rights


Tallying Syria’s War Dead

“Led by the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), the process began with creating a merged dataset of “fully identified victims” to avoid double counting. Only casualties whose complete details were listed — such as their full name, date of death and the governorate they had been killed in — were included on this initial list, explained Megan Price, executive director at HRDAG. If details were missing, the victim could not be confidently cross-checked across the eight organizations’ lists, and so was excluded. This provided HRDAG and the U.N. with a minimum count of individuals whose deaths were fully documented by at least one of the different organizations. … “


Verdad al acecho (The Truth Is Stalking)


Fosas clandestinas en México manifiestan existencia de crímenes de lesa humanidad

Patrick Ball, estadístico norteamericano, colabora con el Programa de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Iberoamericana en una investigación sobre fosas clandestinas.


Our work has been used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations. We have worked with partners on projects on five continents.

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