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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.

Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies

This Harvard Data Science Review article uses the least unreliable source of pandemic data: reported deaths.

Why raw data doesn't support analysis of violence

This morning I got a query from a journalist asking for our data from the report we published yesterday. The journalist was hoping to create an interactive infographic to track the number of deaths in the Syrian conflict over time. Our data would not support an analysis like the one proposed, so I wrote this reply. We can't send you these data because they would be misleading—seriously misleading—for the purpose you describe. Here's why: What we have is a list of documented deaths, in essence, a highly non-random sample, though a very big one. We like bigger samples because we think that they must be closer to true. The mathematical justificat...

HRDAG at FAT* 2020: Pre-Trial Risk Assessment Tools

How do police officer booking decisions affect pre-trial risk assessment tools relied upon by judges?

Weighting for the Guatemalan National Police Archive Sample: Unusual Challenges and Problems.”

Gary M. Shapiro, Daniel R. Guzmán, Paul Zador, Tamy Guberek, Megan E. Price, Kristian Lum (2009).“Weighting for the Guatemalan National Police Archive Sample: Unusual Challenges and Problems.”In JSM Proceedings, Survey Research Methods Section. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association.

Letter from Alejandro Valencia Villa

Alejandro Valencia Villa is a Former Commissioner of the Colombian Truth Commission. (Letter in English, and letter in Spanish.) Introduction One of the most obvious and most difficult questions to answer when analyzing an armed conflict is determining the number of victims. In a conflict like Colombia’s, prolonged and with complex characteristics due to the different nature of the armed actors and because they committed a great variety and quantity of human rights violations and breaches of humanitarian law, the challenge is even greater. As if this were not enough, Colombia also had a large number of records of these violations and infract...

Nonprofits Are Taking a Wide-Eyed Look at What Data Could Do

In this story about how data are transforming the nonprofit world, Patrick Ball is quoted. Here's an excerpt: "Data can have a profound impact on certain problems, but nonprofits are kidding themselves if they think the data techniques used by corporations can be applied wholesale to social problems," says Patrick Ball, head of the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Companies, he says, maintain complete data sets. A business knows every product it made last year, when it sold, and to whom. Charities, he says, are a different story. "If you're looking at poverty or trafficking or homicide, we don't have all the data, and we're not going to," ...

Shots fired: Can technology really keep us safe from gunfire?

Bailey Passmore + Larry Barrett. 2025. Shots fired: Can technology really keep us safe from gunfire? Significance, Volume 22, Issue 4, July 2025, Pages 34–37. 27 May 2025. © Royal Statistical Society 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrssig/qmaf042

Bailey Passmore + Larry Barrett. 2025. Shots fired: Can technology really keep us safe from gunfire? Significance, Volume 22, Issue 4, July 2025, Pages 34–37. 27 May 2025. © Royal Statistical Society 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrssig/qmaf042

Civil War in Syria: The Internet as a Weapon of War

Suddeutsche Zeitung writer Hakan Tanriverdi interviews HRDAG affiliate Anita Gohdes and writes about her work on the Syrian casualty enumeration project for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. This article, "Bürgerkrieg in Syrien: Das Internet als Kriegswaffe," is in German. Suddeutsche Zeitung Hakan Tanriverdi January 4, 2015 Link to story on SZ Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria) Back to Press Room

Skoll World Forum 2018

Illuminating Data's Dark Side: Big data create conveniences, but we must consider who designs these tools, who benefits from them, and who is left out of the equation.

Using Data and Statistics to Bring Down Dictators

In this story, Guerrini discusses the impact of HRDAG's work in Guatemala, especially the trials of General José Efraín Ríos Montt and Colonel Héctor Bol de la Cruz, as well as work in El Salvador, Syria, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste. Multiple systems estimation and the perils of using raw data to draw conclusions are also addressed. Megan Price and Patrick Ball are quoted, especially in regard to how to use raw data. “From our perspective,” Price says, “the solution to that is both to stay very close to the data, to be very conservative in your interpretation of it and to be very clear about where the data came from, how it was collected, what ...

The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-Leste, 1974-1999

Romesh Silva and Patrick Ball. “The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-Leste, 1974-1999″, a Report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group to the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. 9 February 2006.

Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools

Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG's Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made contributions to the primer.>>

Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG’s Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made significant contributions to the primer.>>

HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2021

At HRDAG, 2021 was all about service and partnership.

HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2020

In 2020, HRDAG provided clarity on issues related to the pandemic, police misconduct, and more.

Using Math and Science to Count Killings in Syria

In this afternoon "Lightning Talk" at RightsCon 2014, Megan Price spoke about the importance of using models to adjust for variability when reporting human rights violations and mentioned innovative tools that can be used for tracking abuses. RIGHTSCON March 4, 2014 San Francisco, California Link to RightsCon program Back to Talks

Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY).

Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovic, and Jana Asher. Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY). © 2002 American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative. [full text]

Political Killings in Kosovo, March–June, 1999

Political Killings in Kosovo, March–June, 1999. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Human Rights Program. © 2000 American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative.

The ghost in the machine

“Every kind of classification system – human or machine – has several kinds of errors it might make,” [Patrick Ball] says. “To frame that in a machine learning context, what kind of error do we want the machine to make?” HRDAG’s work on predictive policing shows that “predictive policing” finds patterns in police records, not patterns in occurrence of crime.

Estimating Deaths

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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