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Data ‘hashing’ improves estimate of the number of victims in databases

But while HRDAG’s estimate relied on the painstaking efforts of human workers to carefully weed out potential duplicate records, hashing with statistical estimation proved to be faster, easier and less expensive. The researchers said hashing also had the important advantage of a sharp confidence interval: The range of error is plus or minus 1,772, or less than 1 percent of the total number of victims.

“The big win from this method is that we can quickly calculate the probable number of unique elements in a dataset with many duplicates,” said Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s director of research. “We can do a lot with this estimate.”


Historic verdict in Guatemala—Gen.Efraín Ríos Montt found guilty

I've been working with various projects in Guatemala to document mass violence since 1993, so in 2011, when Claudia Paz y Paz asked me to revisit the analysis I did for the Commission for Historical Clarification examining the differential mortality rates due to homicide for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the Ixil region, I was delighted. We have far better data processing and statistical methods than we had in 1998, plus much more data. I think the resulting analysis is a conservative lower bound on total homicides of indigenous people. (more…)

Primer to Inform Discussions about Bail Reform

The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.

Without Encryption, My Work Wouldn’t Be Possible

Structural Zero Issue 03 August 24, 2025 Part Three of Our Three-Part “Gathering the Data” Series. Read part one and part two. In computer security, “security” is always relative to something. What are we actually defending against, and how are we doing it? This is our “threat model.” My colleagues and I have been using scientific tools to analyze evidence of human rights abuses, including using statistics to uncover mass graves in Mexico and analyzing under-reported police homicides in the United States. Our work isn’t always popular. It can infuriate those in power who want to cover up incriminating truths about the ...

Evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book

At the end of 2014 we completed the evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book database and are pleased to conclude that the database has succeeded in documenting all or nearly all the human losses during conflicts in Kosovo during the period from 1998 to 2000. With a motto of "Let people remember people," the goal of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB) is to document all people who were killed or disappeared in connection with the war in Kosovo. The project aimed to document all human losses during armed conflict in the territory of the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) between 1998 and 2000. The KMB database evaluation is the fruition of several years of ...

Syria’s celebrations muted by evidence of torture in Assad’s notorious prisons

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group, an independent scientific human rights organization based in San Francisco, has counted at least 17,723 people killed in Syrian custody from 2011 to 2015 — around 300 every week — almost certainly a vast undercount, it says.


FAT* Conference 2018

Kristian Lum spoke about "Understanding the Context and Consequences of Pre-Trial Detention" at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*).

HRDAG at Strata Conference 2014

Last Thursday, HRDAG co-founder and director of research Megan Price presented at Strata, the conference for data scientists and people who work with "big data." In her talk, she addressed the question of how we can know the actual number of conflict casualties in Syrian. Her short answer was, "We don't know." The longer answer was that we have a very good idea of how many conflict casualties have been reported, by several documentation groups, and that we're working on analyzing (more…)

New publication in BIOMETRIKA

New paper in Biometrika, co-authored by HRDAG's Kristian Lum and James Johndrow: Theoretical limits of microclustering in record linkage.

Reflections: Challenging Tasks and Meticulous Defenders

I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.

HRDAG Retreat 2014

Ten data nerds gathered in a large hilltop beach house to analyze counts of killings from several war-torn countries. The time was January 16-20, 2014, the place was near San Francisco, the agenda was packed, and I was excited to be there. Having defended my dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University just days before, I had often supposed that my thesis on a generalization of log-linear models for capture-recapture might serve little other purpose than to fill a line on my curriculum vitae. This perception faded after a mid-2013 discussion with Patrick convinced me that HRDAG's data challenges could easily be the best match to my research ...

HRDAG and #GivingTuesday 2018

Will you help HRDAG advance human rights?

Deaths in Custody during the Armed Conflict in Syria, 2011–2023

Maria Gargiulo, Tarak Shah, Megan Price (2024). Deaths in Custody during the Armed Conflict in Syria, 2011–2023. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 10 December, 2024. © 2024 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

Maria Gargiulo, Tarak Shah, Megan Price (2024). Deaths in Custody during the Armed Conflict in Syria, 2011–2023. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 10 December, 2024. © 2024 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992)

Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019. © 2019 Demographic Research. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27  

Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019. © 2019 Demographic Research. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27


Overbooking’s Impact on Pre-Trial Risk Assessment Tools

How do police officer booking decisions affect tools relied upon by judges?

Tech Note – using LLMs for structured info extraction

This post introduces the methodology of the Innocence Discovery Lab, a collaboration between IPNO and HRDAG.

Transitional Justice in Syria: Accountability and Reconciliation Conference

I spent last weekend in Istanbul at an excellent conference organized by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS). The conference included numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Syria as well as international human rights researchers and advocates. Families of victims told their stories, data collection groups discussed the challenges, and need, to document violations, transitional justice experts worried about infrastructure such as the police force and judicial system, and local leaders pledged to work together for peace. I was invited to speak about HRDAG's recent report examining killings in Syria documented by ...

Accountability at home and abroad

  Dear friends, Our spirits were really on the ground on Wednesday, but they lifted at the board meeting we had at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group on Thursday. Executive Director Megan Price, Director of Research Patrick Ball, and the Board drafted these thoughts which we'd like to share with you. For more than twenty-five years, we have held heads of state accountable for human rights violations. We support our partners and advocates in the human rights field. They collect data which we analyze using technical and scientific expertise. Those scientific results bring clarity to human rights violence and support the fight for justice. ...

Quantitative Data Analysis and Large-Scale Human Rights Violations: An Example of Applied Statistics at the Grassroots.

Romesh Silva. “Quantitative Data Analysis and Large-Scale Human Rights Violations: An Example of Applied Statistics at the Grassroots.” Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society. Canberra (Australia). Volume 32, Number 2, May 2005.


Verdad al acecho (The Truth Is Stalking)


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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