andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-12 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Andrew Mack writes: There was a brief commentary from the Benetech folk on the Human Security Report Project’s, “The Shrinking Costs of War” report on your blog in January. But the report has since generated a lot of public controversy . Since the report–like the current discussion in your blog on Mike Spagat’s new paper on Iraq–deals with controversies generated by survey-based excess death estimates, we thought your readers might be interested. Our responses to the debate were posted on our website last week. “Shrinking Costs” had discussed the dramatic decline in death tolls from wartime violence since the end of World War II –and its causes. We also argued that deaths from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition had declined. (The exec. summary is here .) One of the most striking findings was that mortality rates (we used under-five mortality data) decline during most wars. Indeed our latest research indicates that of the total number of years that countries w
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1 Andrew Mack writes: There was a brief commentary from the Benetech folk on the Human Security Report Project’s, “The Shrinking Costs of War” report on your blog in January. [sent-1, score-0.188]
2 But the report has since generated a lot of public controversy . [sent-2, score-0.267]
3 Since the report–like the current discussion in your blog on Mike Spagat’s new paper on Iraq–deals with controversies generated by survey-based excess death estimates, we thought your readers might be interested. [sent-3, score-0.691]
4 “Shrinking Costs” had discussed the dramatic decline in death tolls from wartime violence since the end of World War II –and its causes. [sent-5, score-0.493]
5 ) One of the most striking findings was that mortality rates (we used under-five mortality data) decline during most wars. [sent-9, score-0.649]
6 Indeed our latest research indicates that of the total number of years that countries were involved in warfare between 1970 and 2008, the child mortality rate increases in only 5% of them. [sent-10, score-0.497]
7 These are part of what UNICEF has aptly described as “the revolution in child survival”. [sent-13, score-0.178]
8 4 million excess death toll for the Congo (1998-2007) produced by the International Rescue Committee (IRC). [sent-15, score-0.815]
9 The IRC is a well-respected humanitarian NGO and its widely-cited, peer-reviewed survey-based excess death toll estimates had not been subjected to any of the public controversy that has surrounded excess war death estimates in Iraq and Darfur. [sent-16, score-1.598]
10 But when we delved into the IRC’s reports we uncovered many methodological and data problems which had the net effect of greatly, and, we believe, unwarrantably, increasing the excess death toll. [sent-17, score-0.599]
11 The first two surveys–there were five in toto–were not based on representative samples and the evidence suggests that the excess death tolls that were derived from them were far too high. [sent-18, score-0.748]
12 When we plotted the increase in the IRC’s child mortality rate for the first two survey periods and compared it with the child mortality trend data from a Demographic and Health Survey that covered the same period, it was clear that something was seriously wrong. [sent-19, score-1.014]
13 The bright blue U5MR trend line in the graph below is the one derived from the IRC’s survey data. [sent-20, score-0.233]
14 5 million excess deaths for this period must be far too high. [sent-22, score-0.502]
15 The second major problem was that the IRC researchers used the sub-Saharan African (SSA) average mortality rate as the baseline mortality rate for their excess death calculations. [sent-24, score-1.449]
16 When we re-ran the IRC’s calculations for the last three surveys using a higher and–we argue–more realistic baseline rate, the excess death toll shrank from more than 2. [sent-26, score-0.984]
17 The point we were making was not that our baseline estimate was necessarily correct, but rather that a modest and wholly defensible increase in the baseline rate can lead to a huge change in the excess death toll. [sent-28, score-0.947]
18 Their responses were widely circulated in the media and generated a lot of commentary in the blogosphere. [sent-30, score-0.305]
19 This page provides (a) a very brief intro to the debate, (b) a link to an overview of our take on the main issues in the debate, (c) detailed responses to the IRC and Les Roberts critiques. [sent-32, score-0.204]
20 On a technical matter, the above graph is pretty good but could be improved: - Label the lines directly rather than with a color code - Put fewer axis labels (x can be 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and y can be 0, 10%, 20%, 30%) and make the labels larger and thus more readable. [sent-35, score-0.231]
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Introduction: Mike Spagat points to this interview , which, he writes, covers themes that are discussed on the blog such as wrong ideas that don’t die, peer review and the statistics of conflict deaths. I agree. It’s good stuff. Here are some of the things that Spagat says (he’s being interviewed by Joel Wing): In fact, the standard excess-deaths concept leads to an interesting conundrum when combined with an interesting fact exposed in the next-to-latest Human Security Report ; in most countries child mortality rates decline during armed conflict (chapter 6). So if you believe the usual excess-death causality story then you’re forced to conclude that many conflicts actually save the lives of many children. Of course, the idea of wars savings lives is pretty hard to swallow. A much more sensible understanding is that there are a variety of factors that determine child deaths and that in many cases the factors that save the lives of children are stronger than the negative effects that confli
Introduction: Mike Spagat sent me an email with the above heading, referring to this paper by Leontine Alkema and Jin Rou New, which begins: National estimates of the under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) are used to track progress in reducing child mortality and to evaluate countries’ performance related to United Nations Millennium Development Goal 4, which calls for a reduction in the U5MR by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. However, for the great majority of developing countries without well-functioning vital registration systems, estimating levels and trends in child mortality is challenging, not only because of limited data availability but also because of issues with data quality. Global U5MR estimates are often constructed without accounting for potential biases in data series, which may lead to inaccurate point estimates and/or credible intervals. We describe a Bayesian penalized B-spline regression model for assessing levels and trends in the U5MR for all countries in the world, whereby bi
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Introduction: Andrew Mack writes: There was a brief commentary from the Benetech folk on the Human Security Report Project’s, “The Shrinking Costs of War” report on your blog in January. But the report has since generated a lot of public controversy . Since the report–like the current discussion in your blog on Mike Spagat’s new paper on Iraq–deals with controversies generated by survey-based excess death estimates, we thought your readers might be interested. Our responses to the debate were posted on our website last week. “Shrinking Costs” had discussed the dramatic decline in death tolls from wartime violence since the end of World War II –and its causes. We also argued that deaths from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition had declined. (The exec. summary is here .) One of the most striking findings was that mortality rates (we used under-five mortality data) decline during most wars. Indeed our latest research indicates that of the total number of years that countries w
Introduction: Mike Spagat sends in an interesting explanation for the noted problems with conflict mortality studies (a topic we’ve discussed on occasion on this blog). Spagat writes: This analysis is based on the fact that conflict violence does not spread out at all uniformly across a map but, rather, tends to concentrate in a few areas. This means that small, headline-grabbing violence surveys are extremely unreliable. There is a second point, based on the work of David Hemenway which you’ve also cited on your blog. Even within exceptionally violent environments most households will still not have a violent death. So a very small false positive rate in a household survey will cause substantial upward bias in violence estimates.
Introduction: Earlier today, Nate criticized a U.S. military survey that asks troops the question, “Do you currently serve with a male or female Service member you believe to be homosexual.” [emphasis added] As Nate points out, by asking this question in such a speculative way, “it would seem that you’ll be picking up a tremendous number of false positives–soldiers who are believed to be gay, but aren’t–and that these false positives will swamp any instances in which soldiers (in spite of DADT) are actually somewhat open about their same-sex attractions.” This is a general problem in survey research. In an article in Chance magazine in 1997, “The myth of millions of annual self-defense gun uses: a case study of survey overestimates of rare events” [see here for related references], David Hemenway uses the false-positive, false-negative reasoning to explain this bias in terms of probability theory. Misclassifications that induce seemingly minor biases in estimates of certain small probab
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