# Daily casualties in Syria

February 9, 2012
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(This article was first published on Statisfaction » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Every new day brings its statistics of new deaths in Syria… Here is an attempt to learn about the Syrian uprising by the figures. Data vary among sources: the Syrian opposition provides the number of casualties by day (here on Dropbox), updated on 8 February 2012, with a total exceeding 8 000.

We note first that the attacks accelerate, as the cumulated graph is mostly convex (click to enlarge):

Plotting the numbers by day shows the bloody situation of  Fridays, a gathering day in the Muslin calendar. This point was especially true at the beginning of the uprising, but lately any other day can be equally deadly:

There are almost twice as much deaths on Fridays as any other day in average:
Here are boxplots for the logarithm of daily casualties by day of the week:

and their density estimates, first coloured by day of the week, then by Friday vs rest of the week:

Here is the code (with clumsy parts for fitting the data frames for ggplot, do not hesitate to comment on it)

library(ggplot2)
input$LogicalFriday=factor(input$WeekDay =="Friday",levels = c(FALSE, TRUE),
labels = c("Not Friday", "Friday"))
input$Date=as.Date(input$History,"%d/%m/%Y")
input$WeekDays=factor(input$WeekDay,
levels=unique(as.character(input\$WeekDay[7:13]))) # trick to sort the legend
qplot(x=Date,y=cumsum(Number), data=input, geom="line",color=I("red"),xlab="",ylab="",lwd=I(1))
qplot(x=as.factor(Date),y=Number, data=input, geom="bar",fill=LogicalFriday,xlab="",ylab="")
qplot(log(Number+1), data=input, geom="density",fill=LogicalFriday,xlab="",ylab="",alpha=I(.2))
qplot(log(Number+1), data=input, geom="density",fill=WeekDay,xlab="",ylab="",alpha=I(.2))
qplot(WeekDays,log(Number+1),data=input,geom="boxplot",xlab="",ylab="",colour=WeekDays)

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