Almost done with my analysis, so far I found, regional violence, peaceful protest vs violent protest, and time trends to find if there are any patterns hidden

Maknoor showed us her findings today which was pretty interesting. I have also resubmitted my report and I am awaiting for further corrections. This new dataset is pretty frusting to work with because of its complex structure and information. Hopefully I can start my analysis soon.

In last class we didn’t discuss much, I am still working on this dataset, it is quite difficult understand and come up with questions.

So far the only question I would wanna develop is

1. Do protests turn violent in certain regions? or do certain types of protests by certain people always become violent.

Today we discussed about Randomness!!  Randomness has not been defined yet by no one.there are two types of randomness, Uniform and poisson (which is completely spatial randomness). Uniform randomness is a random variable where each outcome in a given range has an equal probability of occurring. While Poisson process describes events occurring randomly and independently at a constant average rate over time or space. 

We started looking at the new dataset today. It comes from ACLED and it has information about political violence and other sorts of violence. Gary also talked about “Clustering” specifically “K-means clustering”  which is a very popular technique used in unsupervised learning.  which are used to group similar type of data which have no labels.

After looking at the ACLED dataset I have come up with two questions..

1. Do protests turn violent in certain regions? or do certain types of protests by certain people always become violent
2.  Do certain actors appear frequently in violent events?

 

Today we discussed one of Gary’s analysis, we talked about how temperature does in fact do not influence the number of police shootings. the data seemed to be scattered throughout the plot. which means that high number of shootings happen both in lower temperatures as well as higher temperature, and likewise.

I will be submitting my report on the same question today

In today’s class Mahnoor showed us her interesting findings .

The comparison was if black people (or a particular race) were shot more when compared to their overall population contribution. It was crazy to see that in majority of counties the killings were one particular race only even though they were less in population.

could it be because of racial discrimination? or could it be that particular race is just being more violent, this brings out many questions…

In today’s class we learnt that, In a time series the standard deviation should be 2 times from the Mean (Average). Two  Std Deviation Above and two std Deviation below from the mean line. (also you could say its 2.5% Standard deviations)

Also Standard Normal Distribution = Gaussian Distribution = “law of errors” 

In today’s class Gary introduced us to “Mathematica” which is a free software to do math graph, plotting and all the good stuff.

We later talked about concepts like Pareto curve, Histogram and something called the Analysis of variance. Pareto chart or diagram, is a bar graph based on the Pareto principle, which states that 80% of results come from 20% of causes.

I have decided that I will start working on my report using the help of Mathematica  along with my partner Syed.

Gary started the class off by showing us the map of different counties in the state of Massachusetts and how the counties change overtime, sometimes in just a span of few decades. Then we started talking about the data set.

During this session I had come up with a second question…

I would like to learn about gun laws across different counties and states. For example, what is the age requirement to own a gun in a particular state? Is open carry legal there? How about Permits and background checks? Are gun laws stricter in some states and more lenient in others?

If some states have more lenient laws, that could mean more people running around with guns, potentially leading to an increase in police shootings, right? To analyze this, I would need to categorize states into two groups: strict and lenient. By comparing these groups, I could find out whether stricter gun laws correlate with lower violence and fewer shootings.

But, how should I define “strict” versus “lenient” gun laws? What criteria should I use to make this distinction?