Statistics of War Casualties

Bachelor thesis (2019)

Authors

P. Mokhov Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

P. Cirillo Applied Probability (mentor)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2019 Peter Mokhov
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Published Date

31-07-2019

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

In this thesis we statistically analyze violent conflicts. The main focus lies on the risk of occurrence of large wars. We collected data that provides the total amount of casualties, for every known war, in the time span 768CE - 2019. The distribution of the data suggests a presence of a long right tail. We have used different graphical tools to determine that the tail is Paretian and to locate the threshold value u for which the tail starts. Fitting the Generalized Pareto Distribution we have found that this tail starts from the 70% quantile which corresponds to a total number of casualties of 70000. We have found through the method of maximum likelihood a shape parameter of ξ = 1.3 and a scale parameter β = 193397. The threshold and these estimates provide us enough material to determine the tail risk using the survival function.
We have researched the inter-arrival times and we support the idea from earlier studies that the occurrence of wars follow a homogeneous Poisson process and that therefore no particular trend can be stated.

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