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Location, Location, Location: An MCMC Approach to Modeling the Spatial Context of War and Peace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Michael D. Ward  and
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
Michael D. Ward
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Center for Statistics in the Social Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, and Éspace Éurope, Université Pierre Mendès France, Grenoble, France, BP 38040. e-mail: mdw@u.washington.edu
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0521. e-mail: kgleditsch@ucsd.edu
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Abstract

This article demonstrates how spatially dependent data with a categorical response variable can be addressed in a statistical model. We introduce the idea of an autologistic model where the response for one observation is dependent on the value of the response among adjacent observations. The autologistic model has likelihood function that is mathematically intractable, since the observations are conditionally dependent upon one another. We review alternative techniques for estimating this model, with special emphasis on recent advances using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. We evaluate a highly simplified autologistic model of conflict where the likelihood of war involvement for each nation is conditional on the war involvement of proximate states. We estimate this autologistic model for a single year (1988) via maximum pseudolikelihood and MCMC maximum likelihood methods. Our results indicate that the autologistic model fits the data much better than an unconditional model and that the MCMC estimates generally dominate the pseudolikelihood estimates. The autologistic model generates predicted probabilities greater than 0.5 and has relatively good predictive abilities in an out-of-sample forecast for the subsequent decade (1989 to 1998), correctly identifying not only ongoing conflicts, but also new ones.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 10 , Issue 3: Special Issue on Spatial Methods in Political Science , Summer 2002 , pp. 244 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association 2002 

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