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Estimating the number of casualties in the American Indian War: a Bayesian analysis using the power law distribution. (English) Zbl 1383.62333

Summary: The American Indian War lasted over one hundred years, and is a major event in the history of North America. As expected, since the war commenced in late eighteenth century, casualty records surrounding this conflict contain numerous sources of error, such as rounding and counting. Additionally, while major battles such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn were recorded, many smaller skirmishes were completely omitted from the records. Over the last few decades, it has been observed that the number of casualties in major conflicts follows a power law distribution. This paper places this observation within the Bayesian paradigm, enabling modelling of different error sources, allowing inferences to be made about the overall casualty numbers in the American Indian War.

MSC:

62P25 Applications of statistics to social sciences
62F15 Bayesian inference