Related papers: On the frequency and severity of interstate wars
It has been claimed and disputed that World War II has been followed by a `long peace', an unprecedented decline of war. We conduct a full changepoint analysis of well-documented, publicly-available battle deaths datasets, using new…
I thank Thomas Richardson and James Robins for their discussion of my paper, and discuss the similarities and differences between their approach to causal modelling, based on single world intervention graphs, and my own decision-theoretic…
Enduring violent conflicts are interrupted by lulls without violence. Studies of interevent times found power law distributions based on coarse-grained data with a resolution of one day. Fine-grained data of violence with a resolution of…
Acts of political violence in the continental United States have increased dramatically in the last decade. For this rise in political violence, we are interested in where and when such incidents occur: how are the locations and times of…
In the United States, firearm-related deaths and injuries are a major public health issue. Because of limited federal action, state policies are particularly important, and their evaluation informs the actions of other policymakers. The…
Armed conflict data display scaling and universal dynamics in both social and physical properties like fatalities and geographic extent. We propose a randomly branching, armed-conflict model that relates multiple properties to one another…
We have studied the time lags between commercial line airplane disasters and their occurrence frequency till 2002, as obtained from a freely available website. We show that the time lags seem to be well described by Poisson random events,…
Statistical laws describe regular patterns observed in diverse scientific domains, ranging from the magnitude of earthquakes (Gutenberg-Richter law) and metabolic rates in organisms (Kleiber's law), to the frequency distribution of words in…
We investigate statistical inference across time scales. We take as toy model the estimation of the intensity of a discretely observed compound Poisson process with symmetric Bernoulli jumps. We have data at different time scales:…
I present a novel approach to estimating the temporal and spatial patterns of violent conflict. I show how we can use highly temporally and spatially disaggregated data on conflict events in tandem with Gaussian processes to estimate…
We discuss a non-equilibrium statistical system on a graph or network. Identical particles are injected, interact with each other, traverse, and leave the graph in a stochastic manner described in terms of Poisson rates, possibly dependent…
The statistics of Lagrangian pair dispersion in a homogeneous isotropic flow is investigated by means of direct numerical simulations. The focus is on deviations from Richardson eddy-diffusivity model and in particular on the strong…
Studying event time series is a powerful approach for analyzing the dynamics of complex dynamical systems in many fields of science. In this paper, we describe the method of event coincidence analysis to provide a framework for quantifying…
Neural computations arising from myriads of interactions between spiking neurons can be modeled as network dynamics with punctuate interactions. However, most relevant dynamics do not allow for computational tractability. To circumvent this…
Measuring the intensity of events is crucial for monitoring and tracking armed conflict. Advances in automated event extraction have yielded massive data sets of "who did what to whom" micro-records that enable data-driven approaches to…
This document presents the statistical methods used to process low-level measurements in the presence of noise. These methods can be classical or Bayesian. The question is placed in the general framework of the problem of nuisance…
Commonly observed patterns typically follow a few distinct families of probability distributions. Over one hundred years ago, Karl Pearson provided a systematic derivation and classification of the common continuous distributions. His…
Networks play a central role in modern data analysis, enabling us to reason about systems by studying the relationships between their parts. Most often in network analysis, the edges are given. However, in many systems it is difficult or…
Causality is a subject of philosophical debate and a central scientific issue with a long history. In the statistical domain, the study of cause and effect based on the notion of `fairness' in comparisons dates back several hundred years,…
An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…