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Can Statistics Predict the Outcome of a War?

Posted by kdawson on from the first-you-have-to-get-the-inputs-right dept.

StatisticallyDeadGuy writes "A University of Georgia scientist has developed a statistical system that can, she claims, predict the outcome of wars with an accuracy of 80 percent. Her approach, applied retrospectively, says the US chance of victory in the first Gulf War was 93%, while the poor Soviets only had a 7% chance in Afghanistan (if only they'd known; failure maybe triggered the collapse of the USSR). As for the current Iraq conflict: the US started off with a 70% chance of a successful regime change, which was duly achieved — but extending the mission past this to support a weak government has dropped the probability of ultimate success to 26%. Full elaboration of the forecasting methodology is laid out in a new paper (subscription required — link goes to the abstract). Some details can be gleaned from her 2006 draft (PDF)."

3 of 572 comments (clear)

  1. Re:0% by pcaylor · · Score: 4, Informative

    I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there Doctor.

    (I hope most people realize the parent is quoting Dr. Strangelove.)

  2. Re:100% likely outcome by Frequency+Domain · · Score: 4, Informative

    Can Statistics Predict the Outcome of a War?

    No.
    This may or may not be so.

    Statistics can never predict the outcome, they can only give you a probability of an outcome.
    Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. There are many kinds of statistical models. Models such as logisitic regression map inputs to probabilities of outcomes, but models such as linear regression map the inputs to the actual predicted outcomes, not their probabilities.

    A statistical model can be predictive without being causal, i.e., the inputs don't necesarrily cause the outcome, but they are observed to occur jointly. Hence the old saying "correlation is not the same thing as causality". There are lots of good examples of this, one of my favorites is that the number of deaths by drowning per month in Finland is highly correlated with the ice cream consumption per month. People don't drown due to the ice cream - the correlation is because the number of people drowning in a given month is proportional to how many people go swimming, and many fewer people go swimming or eat ice cream in Finland's winter months.

  3. non-exact quote.. by Animaether · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know about that exact quote, but a few dozen sites seem to attribute the quote "Peace is the interlude between two wars" to an Indian spiritual leader called "Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba". There are other attributions (such as somebody's unnamed boss), but this seems to be the most popular. If nothing else, try a google search with 'interlude' as one of the key words (along with war / peace).

    Just in case that hits the nail on the head - send your $5 to a Multiple Sclerosis research center plzkthx.