We now return, after a long hiatus, to our discussion of matching violent events across datasets. Before diving into the details we want to remind readers about what we’re doing here and why it’s important. The immediate context is a discussion of major flaws in this paper by Carpenter, Fuller and Roberts (CFR) that claims … Continue reading The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 3
Multiple Systems Estimation
Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 7
Today I return to Peru. If you're not up to speed on this discussion please go back to post 1 of the present series. I could include this post in either this series, this series or this series. But I think it works best within my first Peru series because the present post covers an … Continue reading Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 7
The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 3
This post continues my series on Silvio Rendon's rejoinder to the reply of Daniel Manrique-Vallier and Patrick Ball (MVB) to Silvio Rendon's critique of the statistical work of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). OK that's complicated so how about this? The present series covers a second paper by Rendon that definitively shreds the TRC's … Continue reading The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 3
The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 2
Back to blogging after diverting my energy in recent weeks to putting out a few fires. I'll assume here that you've read the first post of this new series. So you know that overfitting is a terminal problem for the Shining Path (SP) estimates published in the statistical report of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission … Continue reading The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 2
The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 1
Silvio Rendon's powerful rejoinder on the statistical work of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is finally out. This is a big development so I'm starting a brand new series to cover it. Of course, this new series is related to the earlier one. But I'll strive to make the present series self-contained so you can start here if … Continue reading The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 1
The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 2
This is my second post with Josh Dougherty of Iraq Body Count (IBC). We asserted in the first one that Carpenter, Fuller and Roberts (CFR) did a terrible job of matching violent events in Iraq, 2004-2009, between the IBC dataset and the SIGACTs dataset of the US military and its coalition partners. In particular, CFR … Continue reading The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 2
The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 1
I argued in an earlier post that matching deaths across lists is a nontrivial exercise that involves a lot of judgement and that, therefore, needs to be done transparently. Here is the promised follow up post which I do jointly with Josh Dougherty of Iraq Body Count. In fact, we’ll make this into another multi-part … Continue reading The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 1
Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 6
This is the latest installment in a series that considers the statistical report done for the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Silvio Rendon’s critique of this statistical report and a reply to Rendon from Daniel Manrique Vallier and Patrick Ball (MVB) who worked on the TRC statistical report. The present post continues to discuss the MVB reply. (Note … Continue reading Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 6
Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 5
I'll start this post by reacting to some interesting comments to part 4 of this series which was, you may be surprised to learn, preceded by part 1, part 2 and part 3. I'll assume that readers have some familiarity with these posts but I'll also try to go slowly and remind readers of things … Continue reading Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 5
Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 4
This is the fourth post in a series on the statistical report of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) , the critique of that report published by Sylvio Rendon, the reply to Rendon from two authors of the statistical report and, eventually, Rendon's rejoinder which has not yet been published. My earlier posts are … Continue reading Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 4
War, Numbers and Human Losses 