Model trees with topic model preprocessing: An approach for data journalism illustrated with the Wikileaks Afghanistan war logs

Annals of Applied Statistics

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 613-639

  Rusch, Thomas ^a   Hofmarcher, Paul ^b   Hatzinger, Reinhold ^a   Hornik, Kurt ^a  

^a VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS   (Austria)

^b JOHANNES KEPLER UNIVERSITY LINZ   (Austria)

Author keywords

Afghanistan; Computational social science; Count data; Database data; Latent Dirichlet allocation; Model based recursive partitioning; Text mining; Tree stability; Tree validation; WikiLeaks

Indexed keywords

EID: 84879514447     PISSN: 19326157     EISSN: 19417330     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1214/12-AOAS618     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. AITKIN, M., FRANCIS, B., HINDE, J. and DARNELL, R. (2009). Statistical Modelling in R. Oxford Univ. Press, New York.
2. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL (2009). Afghanistan: German government must investigate deadly Kunduz airstrikes. Available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/ afghanistan-german-government-must-investigate-deadly-kunduz-airstrikes-20091030.
3. BHUTTA, Z. A. (2002). Children of war: The real casualties of the Afghan conflict. BMJ 324 349-352.
4. BIRD, S. M. and FAIRWEATHER, C. B. (2007). Military fatality rates (by cause) in Afghanistan and Iraq: A measure of hostilities. Int. J. Epidemiol. 36 841-846.
5. BLEI, D. (2012). Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM 55 77-84.
6. BLEI, D. M., JORDAN, M. I. and NG, A. (2003). Latent Dirichlet allocation. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 3 993-1022.
7. BLEI, D. M. and LAFFERTY, J. D. (2007). A correlated topic model of Science. Ann. Appl. Stat. 1 17-35. MR2393839
8. BLEI, D. M. and LAFFERTY, J. D. (2009). Topic models. In Text Mining: Classification, Clustering, and Applications (A. Srivastava and M. Sahami, eds.). Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.
9. BOHANNON, J. (2011). The war in Afghanistan. Counting the dead in Afghanistan. Science 331 1256-1260.
10. BORTKIEWICZ, L. (1898). Das Gesetz der Kleinen Zahlen [The Law of Small Numbers]. Teubner, Leipzig.
11. BURNHAM, G., LAFTA, R., DOOCY, S. and ROBERTS, L. (2006). Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet 368 1421-1428.
12. BUZZELL, E. and PRESTON, S. H. (2007). Mortality of American troops in the Iraq war. Population and Development Review 33 555-566.
13. CHANG, J., BOYD-GRABER, J., WANG, C., GERRISH, S. and BLEI, D. M. (2009). Reading tea leaves: How humans interpret topic models. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22: 23rd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2009 Desc: Proceedings of a Meeting Held 7-10 December 2009, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
14. CHOI, Y., AHN, H. and CHEN, J. J. (2005). Regression trees for analysis of count data with extra Poisson variation. Comput. Statist. Data Anal. 49 893-915. MR2141425
15. CIOFFI-REVILLA, C. (2010). Computational social science. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics 2 259-271.
16. COHEN, S., HAMILTON, J. T. and TURNER, F. (2011). Computational journalism: How computer scientists can empower journalists, democracy's watchdogs, in the production of news in the public interest. Communciations of the ACM 54 66-71.
17. CONWAY, D. (2010). Wikileaks Afghanistan data. Available at http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p= 2226.
18. DEERWESTER, S., DUMAIS, S. T., FURNAS, G. W., LANDAUER, T. K. and HARSHMAN, R. (1990). Indexing by latent semantic analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 41 391-407.
19. DEGOMME, O. and GUHA-SAPIR, D. (2010). Patterns of mortality rates in Darfur conflict. Lancet 375 294-300.
20. FIRM (2011). Cluster@WU. Available at http://www.wu.ac.at/firm/cluster_folder.
21. FRIENDLY, M. (2001). Visualizing Categorical Data. SAS publishing, Cary, NC.
22. GARFIELD, R. M. and NEUGUT, A. I. (1991). Epidemiologic analysis of warfare. A historical review. J. Amer. Med. Assoc. 266 688-692.
23. GEBAUER, M. (2010). Explosive leaks provide image of war from those fighting it. Available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html.
24. GRIFFITHS, T. L. and STEYVERS, M. (2004). Finding scientific topics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101 Suppl 1 5228-5235.
25. GRÜN, B. and HORNIK, K. (2011). topicmodels: An R package for fitting topic models. Journal of Statistical Software 40 1-30.
26. GUARDIAN. CO. UK (2010). Afghanistan war logs: 56 civilians killed in Nato bombing. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/afghanistan/warlogs/826B488C-EA6F-A132-511610DB68C2EDBD.
27. HAUSHOFER, J., BILETZKI, A. and KANWISHER, N. (2010). Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 107 17927-17932.
28. HENNIG, C. (2007). Cluster-wise assessment of cluster stability. Comput. Statist. Data Anal. 52 258-271. MR2409980
29. HOFMANN, T. (1999). Probabilistic latent semantic indexing. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. SIGIR'99 50-57. ACM, New York.
30. HOFMARCHER, P., THEUSSL, S. and HORNIK, K. (2011). Do media sentiments reflect economic indices. Chinese Business Review 10 487-492.
31. HOLCOMB, J. B., MCMULLIN, N. R., PEARSE, L., CARUSO, J., WADE, C. E., OETYENGERDES, L., CHAMPION, H. R., LAWNICK, M., FARR, W., RODRIGUEZ, S. and BUTLER, F. K. (2007). Causes of death in US Special Operations Forces in the global war on terrorism-2001-2004. Annals of Surgery 245 986-991.
32. HOTHORN, T., HORNIK, K. and ZEILEIS, A. (2006). Unbiased recursive partitioning: A conditional inference framework. J. Comput. Graph. Statist. 15 651-674. MR2291267
33. JACCARD, P. (1901). Distribution de la flore alpine dans le bassin des Dranses et dans quelques régions voisines [Distribution of alpine flora in the Dranse basin and several neighboring regions]. Bulletin de la Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles 37 241-272.
34. KAMPSTRA, P. (2008). Beanplot: A boxplot alternative for visual comparison of distributions. Journal of Statistical Software, Code Snippets 28 1-9.
35. KIM, H. and LOH, W.-Y. (2001). Classification trees with unbiased multiway splits. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 96 589-604. MR1946427
36. KOPF, J., AUGUSTIN, T. and STROBL, C. (2010). The potential of model-based recursive partitioning in the social sciences-Revisiting Ockham's Razor. Technical report, Ludwig-Maximilians Univ., Munich.
37. LAKSTEIN, D. and BLUMENFELD, A. (2005). Israeli army casualties in the second Palestinian uprising. Mil. Med. 170 427-430.
38. LAWLESS, J. F. (1987). Negative binomial and mixed Poisson regression. Canad. J. Statist. 15 209-225. MR0926553
39. LAZER, D., PENTLAND, A., ADAMIC, L., ARAL, S., BARABASI, A. L., BREWER, D., CHRISTAKIS, N., CONTRACTOR, N., FOWLER, J., GUTMANN, M., JEBARA, T., KING, G., MACY, M., ROY, D. and ALSTYNE, M. V. (2009). Life in the network: The coming age of computational social science. Science 323 721-723.
40. LOH, W.-Y. (2002). Regression trees with unbiased variable selection and interaction detection. Statist. Sinica 12 361-386. MR1902715
41. LOH, W.-Y. (2009). Improving the precision of classification trees. Ann. Appl. Stat. 3 1710-1737. MR2752155
42. LOH, W.-Y. and SHIH, Y.-S. (1997). Split selection methods for classification trees. Statist. Sinica 7 815-840. MR1488644
43. MARSHALL, H. and BALFOUR, T. G. (1838). Statistical Report on the Sickness, Mortality, & Invaliding Among the Troops in the West Indies. W. Clowes and Sons, London.
44. NIGHTINGALE, F. (1863). Notes on Hospitals, 3rd ed. Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, London.
45. O'LOUGHLIN, J., WITMER, F. D., LINKE, A. M. and THORWARDSON, N. (2010). Peering into the fog of war: The geography of the Wikileaks Afghanistan war logs, 2004-2009. Eurasian Geography and Economics 51 472-495.
46. R DEVELOPMENT CORE TEAM (2012). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
47. ROGERS, S. (2010). Wikileaks' Afghanistan war logs: How our datajournalism operation worked. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jul/27/wikileaks-afghanistan-datadatajournalism.
48. ROGGIO, B. (2009). US, Afghan troops beat back bold enemy assault in eastern Afghanistan. Available at http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/10/us_afghan_troops_bea.php.
49. RUSCH, T. and ZEILEIS, A. (2013). Gaining insight with recursive partitioning of generalized linear models. J. Stat. Comput. Simul. To appear.
50. RUSCH, T., HOFMARCHER, P., HATZINGER, R. and HORNIK, K. (2011). Modeling mortality rates in the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war logs. Technical Report 112, Research Report Series, Institute for Statistics and Mathematics, WU Wirtschaftsunversität Wien, Vienna.
51. RUSCH, T., ZEILEIS, A., HOTHORN, T. and LEISCH, F. (2012). mobtools: A collection of new StatModels and of utilities for extending mob. R package version 0.0-1.
52. RUSCH, T., HOFMARCHER, P., HATZINGER, R. and HORNIK, K. (2013a). Supplement to "Model trees with topic model preprocessing: An approach for data journalism illustrated with the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war logs. " DOI:10.1214/12-AOAS618SUPPA.
53. RUSCH, T., HOFMARCHER, P., HATZINGER, R. and HORNIK, K. (2013b). Supplement to "Model trees with topic model preprocessing: An approach for data journalism illustrated with the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war logs. " DOI:10.1214/12-AOAS618SUPPB.
54. SPIEGEL, P. B. and SALAMA, P. (2001). War andmortality in Kosovo, 1998-99: An epidemiological testimony. Lancet 355 2204-2209.
55. STEYVERS, M., SMYTH, P., ROSEN-ZVI, M. and GRIFFITHS, T. (2004). Probabilistic author-topic models for information discovery. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. KDD'04 306-315. ACM, New York.
56. THOMAS, T. L., PARKER, A. L., HORN, W. G., MOLE, D., SPIRO, T. R., HOOPER, T. I. and GARLAND, F. C. (2001). Accidents and injuries among US Navy crewmembers during extended submarine patrols, 1997 to 1999. Mil. Med. 166 534-540.
57. TIBSHIRANI, R. and WALTHER, G. (2005). Cluster validation by prediction strength. J. Comput. Graph. Statist. 14 511-528. MR2170199
58. TITOV, I. and MCDONALD, R. (2008). Modeling online reviews with multi-grain topic models. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web. WWW'08 111-120. ACM, New York.
59. VENABLES, W. N. and RIPLEY, B. D. (2002). Modern Applied Statistics with S, 4th ed. Springer, New York.
60. WIKIPEDIA (2010). Operation Medusa-Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Available at http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Medusa.
61. WIKIPEDIA (2011). Special Forces (United States Army)-Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Forces_(United_States_Army).
62. ZAMMIT-MANGION, A., DEWAR, M., KADIRKAMANATHAN, V. and SANGUINETTI, G. (2012). Point process modelling of the Afghan war diary. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109 12414-12419.
63. ZEILEIS, A. andHORNIK, K. (2007). GeneralizedM-fluctuation tests for parameter instability. Stat. Neerl. 61 488-508. MR2351461
64. ZEILEIS, A., HOTHORN, T. andHORNIK, K. (2008). Model-based recursive partitioning. J. Comput. Graph. Statist. 17 492-514. MR2439970
65. ZHANG, Y., JIN, R. and ZHOU, Z.-H. (2010). Understanding bag-of-words model: A statistical framework. International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics 1 43-52.