@article{ref1,
title="Challenges of measuring progress in Afghanistan using violence trends: the effects of aggregation, military operations, seasonality, weather, and other causal factors",
journal="Defence and security analysis",
year="2012",
author="Gons, Eric and Schroden, Jonathan and McAlinden, Ryan and Gaul, Marcus and Van Poppel, Bret",
volume="28",
number="2",
pages="100-113",
abstract="Measuring nationwide progress of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan using violence trends is difficult due to several factors: aggregation of data to the national level may obfuscate disparate local trends; the observed seasonality in violence makes comparisons difficult and may obscure progress; and short-term spikes or troughs -- attributable to weather, military operations and tempo, or holiday periods -- heavily influence simple averaging schemes. Despite these challenges, proper understanding of violence statistics is critical to estimating the effectiveness of military forces added during a surge or redeployed as part of transition. This article explores methods for analyzing observed violence trends to identify causal factors, to provide a comparable baseline, and to inform assessments at appropriate levels of aggregation. One methodology for seasonal adjustment of violence data is discussed and shown to provide a logical baseline for examining trends. An ordinary least squares regression model is developed and implemented using time-series violence data.<p />",
language="",
issn="1475-1798",
doi="10.1080/14751798.2012.678164",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14751798.2012.678164"
}