5 ms·
You've been added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List – how long will you survive?
- myth_drannon 13y agoFor those who speak Python there is an excellent survival analysis package called Lifelines -https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/lifelines https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/lifelines Written by the same guy who brought you Bayesian Methods for Hackers - https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programmin... And if you are curious where to test your newly acquired knowledge try a Kaggle competition called "Predict malfunctional components of ASUS notebooks" which is a great example of survival analysis usage. http://www.kaggle.com/c/pakdd-cup-2014 http://www.kaggle.com/c/pakdd-cup-2014
- RA_Fisher 13y agoYes! I'm a huge fan of Cam's work. I bit the bullet and put down R to work through the Bayesian Methods book with Python. Learning the language and working through the book has been a lot of fun.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoWhile element of luck is involved, I hardly think getting caught is random. I think a lot depends on preparations and profile you keep.
- mturmon 13y agoAll of these secondary factors (preparations, etc.) can themselves be regarded as "random" or at least unknowable in their extent and their effects. Much like lifetimes of individuals -- having some clear predictability on an individual basis, but in aggregate, well-modeled as random variables. To be a bit more abstract, just because something is "random" does not mean it cannot be characterized with a distribution, expected life, etc. The philosophical/mathematical effort at quantifying randomness has been called "The Taming of Chance".
- mildtrepidation 13y agoThe effectiveness of preparation is not random. Charting the effectiveness of such efforts, were it possible to do so, might yield a random distribution; this does not, however, imply that "all of these secondary factors" can or should be "regarded as random" for anything more than a high-level treatment that becomes worthless in the (individual) context where it actually matters.
- RA_Fisher 13y agoI tried to have a very light touch with the data. Most of what I do is non-parametric -- so in this sense, yes as an individual this analysis is only good if you believe there's some similarity between you and everyone that's ever been on the list (so a finite sample).
- not_kurt_godel 13y agoYou don't understand statistics very well.
- rhizome 13y agoIf it was as simple as "preparation" and "profile," then how do any of them get caught? You'd think those protections would be relatively common knowledge, at least among criminals.
- mildtrepidation 13y agoI think it's reasonable to say the degree of preparation and profile management varies significantly between someone who stole a car and someone who masterminds attacks on tall buildings in New York. Preparation and profile are not "simple," nor are they black and white, as what those things actually mean is massively different from one situation to the next, criminal dealings or not. Characterizing them as something that either does or doesn't happen and does or doesn't entirely cancel the possibility of capture is not useful.
- rhizome 13y agoSomeone who stole a car doesn't make the FBI top 10.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoDepends on a car.
- 6d0debc071 13y agoI don't think criminal society is that well integrated. Nor that the people commonly a part of it are particularly 'with it' individuals. After all - drawing left to right top to bottom, from the FBI most wanted list as of shortly before this post - we have: 1) Kidnap and murder of a little girl 2) Beating and raping a woman in march 1998 - Alleged beating, raping and murder of a second woman while out on bail 3) Alleged Shooting and killing an armoured car driver outside a movie theatre and making off with the money. 4) 1987 escape from prison followed by a 1991 murder and subsequent escape from prison in Mexico after being arrested for drug trafficking 5) Racketeering, conspiracy to launder money instruments, conspiracy to have [assorted drugs] 6) Killing his wife and two children, then burning his house down. These aren't exactly Mensa candidates.
- yukichan 13y ago> df$date_put_on_list <- as.POSIXct(df$date_put_on_list, format = "%m/%d/%Y", tz = "EST") It's a cool blog post but that code isn't near readable to me. Long lines in a tiny rectangle hidden behind horizontal scroll don't make it any easier. It looks like a box of arbitrary characters stuffed into as little space as possible. Although the raw link is a little easier on the eyes: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/statwonk/9448932/raw/84b941b6411baa67e1d90f94c729109f4d0d4864/gistfile1.r https://gist.githubusercontent.com/statwonk/9448932/raw/84b9... Whoever named that method POSIXct needs to like leave the job of naming things to other people maybe.
- RA_Fisher 13y agoYou're right. My pygments Octopress plugin died and I can't figure out how to revive it, some kind of weird cache issue. Also, I see that I forgot to add the data. You can find it here: https://github.com/statwonk/fbi_topten/blob/master/data.csv https://github.com/statwonk/fbi_topten/blob/master/data.csv
- foobarqux 13y agoWhere did you get the data?
- RA_Fisher 13y agoI got the data from the FBI's website. http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/ten-most-wanted-fugitives-60th-anniversary-1950-2010/chronological_listing http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/ten-most-want... I did a bit of cleaning here and there by literally Googling and finding old articles like these: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19780915&id=w_lVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CuIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2278,4163503 http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19780915&id=w... http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1998/feb/22/las-vegas-slaying-suspect-makes-fbis-most-wanted-l/ http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1998/feb/22/las-vegas-slayin... http://vicksburgdailynews.com/2012/05/11/bain-sisters-found-alive-mayes-dead/ http://vicksburgdailynews.com/2012/05/11/bain-sisters-found-... etc.
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- joshlegs 13y agoI was totally hoping this was a cool browser game
- logicallee 13y agoBased on everything we've learned recently about the government's own capabilities, I would think that null hypothesis is that being added to the list has no effect whatsoever. (Since the publication of the list is so much weaker than the government's internal capabilities, and that it is the latter that leads to arrest anyway, not some grocery clerk reporting in.) The easiest way to see this would be to assume there's a fairly close race on average between #10 and #11 in terms of wanted-ness, and so if we knew what the shortlist was and compared the incarceration dates of the runners-up we could figure out whether there's any effect at all to the publication proper.
- RA_Fisher 13y agoI'd speculate the opposite way about the list. There have been a lot of crazy stories about grocery clerks reporting fugitives. The experiment you propose would be really cool to test a hypothesis with.
- dmourati 13y agoI worked as a lawyer in Chicago in the late 1990s and represented a client who was on the FBI top ten most wanted list. His name is Nate Hill. He was a Chicago drug dealer. He fled to Africa and was running a coffee business as a front. US Marshals flew to Africa, found him, kidnapped him, and put him on a flight back to O'Hare. More details on his case: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-05-25/news/9905250177_1_drug-count-money-laundering-co-defendant http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-05-25/news/990525017...
- RA_Fisher 13y agoLooks like he was actually on the Top 15 list of the U.S. Marshall's, not the FBI Top Ten. http://www.usmarshals.gov/investigations/most_wanted/ http://www.usmarshals.gov/investigations/most_wanted/ However, it'd be cool to apply this analysis to that list, too!
- dmourati 13y agoGood find! I guess my memory from back then was a little off. Still, super interesting case to work. I met Hill briefly in the MCC.
- dfc 13y agoAre all arrests kidnappings? Or was there something not kosher about the execution of the warrant?
- lolnowaybrah 13y agoYou would know ra fisher..., you're on it... Robert fisher?
- ds9 13y agoInteresting article - the title however is not only misleading but disturbing. I clicked because it implied that the FBI had dispensed with the inconvenient laws and judicial system and just started killing fugitives when it found them. I mean, they sometimes do, but that's not what the article is about. If the author is reading, maybe change "will you survive" to "until you're found".
- RA_Fisher 13y agoThanks. Yeah, I worried it might be confusing. I use survival analysis and speak about how statisticians use jargon and I wanted that to be in the title somehow.
- stox 13y agoCoincidentally, the one person I knew who made the list lasted for around 400 days. Interestingly enough, another person I knew, who was just short of the list, lasted for 7 years before turning himself in.