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A New Kind of Social Science: Moving Ahead with Reverse Wolfram Models Applied to Event Data.
- Source :
-
Conference Papers -- International Studies Association . 2005 Annual Meeting, Istanbul, p1-38. 40p. - Publication Year :
- 2005
-
Abstract
- Existing formal models of political behavior have followed the lead of the natural sciences and generally focused on methods that use continuous-variable mathematics. Stephen Wolfram has recently produced an extended critique of that approach in the natural sciences, and suggested that a great deal of natural behavior can be accounted for using rules that involve discrete patterns. This paper reports some initial findings from a new NSF-funded project designed to apply this pattern-based method to political event data. The core of this project is a new, publicly-accessible web-based tool designed for the analysis of event data patterns. Using data on the Israel-Palestine conflict for the period 1979-2004, we first consider some differences between the activities of various sub-state actors. While most prior event data analysis has simply aggregated all activities, we demonstrate that some sub-state actors produce streams of activities that are statistically independent. We continue the analysis by showing there are distinctive--and very plausible-- differences in the patterns found during the tenures of various Israeli prime ministers, and the "interesting" patterns go well beyond the simple variations on tit-for-tat that we found in our earlier work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Conference Papers -- International Studies Association
- Publication Type :
- Conference
- Accession number :
- 27158027