Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
December 12, 2018 08:19 pm PST

Using statistics to estimate the true scope of the secret killings at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war

In the last three days of the Sri Lankan civil war, as thousands of people surrendered to government authorities, hundreds of people were put on buses driven by Army officers. Many were never seen again. In a report released today (see here), the International Truth and Justice Project for Sri Lanka and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group showed that over 500 people were disappeared on only three days --- 17, 18, and 19 May. To be clear, these people were not killed, we did not include people who were confirmed as dead. The estimate includes only people last seen in custody of the Sri Lankan authorities. I wrote the statistical parts of the report.

The report begins with seven lists of people reported as disappeared. The lists were compiled by the UN, families of the disappeared, and Sri Lankan officials, among others. It then uses a method called Multiple Systems Estimation to estimate the "dark figure," that is, the people who were disappeared but have not been reported. From 443 people reported on one or more list, we estimate a total population of 503 victims in a two-tailed 95% credible interval from 468 to 554 (it's Bayesian!); see the figure for the posterior distribution of the estimate).

The report contains several references to the academic literature in mathematical statistics that explains how this method works and what the assumptions are. In short, the intuition is that with multiple, independent lists, the more often they document the same people, the fewer people remain undocumented. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/zsTsSztwH4U/using-statistics-to-estimate-t.html

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article