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The IFHS study
The recent release of the IFHS study (via Deltoid) which put the number of Iraqis killed violently during the first 3 years and 4 months after the invasion at a mere 150,000 has generated the expected...
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5 problems with the science of the IFHS study
Reviewing the IFHS study, I found 5 problems with the science of the study. I believe that taken together (but particularly the first three points, regarding the crucial role extrapolation plays in...
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IFHS – Population/sample size correlation
According to the description of the sampling method of IFHS (both in the paper itself and in the supplementary material), 10 households were surveyed in each cluster, and there were (with few...
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IFHS – Missing clusters and extrapolation using IBC data
Missing clusters The IFHS surveyors did not visit all of the clusters in their sample. Those areas that were judged to be dangerous went unsurveyed. Most of the unsurveyed clusters were in Baghdad (31...
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IFHS – Effective sample size
An explanation of the concept of effective sample size is here. This post applies this concept to a particular study. Extrapolating from a sample taken in a reference area containing a relatively small...
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IFHS – Accounting for under-reporting
Justifying the factor used to account for under-reporting of deaths The IFHS sample is a very low mortality group. For the pre-invasion period of about 1.25 years, the group, which contains 61,636...
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IFHS –“Violent deaths”
The main discrepancy between findings in the IFHS paper and those of Burnham et al. is not in the total excess deaths, but in the specific category “violent deaths”. It is therefore of interest to...
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ORB vs. IFHS in U.S. Media
On January 28th, the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB) released an update (via Deltoid) of their previous study estimating violent deaths in post invasion Iraq. The update claims to...
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Rigorous LCB for the expectation of a positive r.v.
A paper of mine was published in the open-access Electronic Journal of Statistics. It proposes a method of constructing lower confidence bounds for positive random variables that are guaranteed to have...
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Hello world!, David Kane, Pro Bono Statistics
While I have been contemplating filling a much needed void in the blogosphere with my own humble contribution, the immediate trigger for this blog is a set of threads in Tim Lambert’s blog, Deltoid: 1,...
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