Turning the Tables

Some important data in the Brookings' Iraq Index only appears in tables (e.g. the prison population data we mentioned in the previous post). Troop strength for US forces and for other Coalition forces may be interest now because of the "surge" in in US Forces that is now reaching its stated goals. However, the troop strength trend data in the most recent report is tabular.

So we turned the tables and transformed it into a small CSV file and created some new charts (see below) using the TLViz interactive trend visualization tool.

If you would like to take a look at the CSV file yourself, you can download it from Troop Strength Table. This table includes three original trends from the Brookings' table (US Troop Strength, Other Coalition Troop Strength, and Total Coalition Force Troop Strength). To that, we have added two calculated trends. The first shows Other Coalition Troop Strength as percentage of Total Troop Strength. The second shows the ratio of US Troop Strength to a nominal value of 135,000.

If you haven't already tried out the TLViz tool that runs on Microsoft Windows as a way for looking at two dimensional tables of trend data, here's another chance. Get started by downloading the base kit. Once you have installed the base kit, you can grab the latest version of TLViz.

If you want to learn more about TLViz, check out some of our earlier posts on the subject starting in chronological order with the ones from early January.


This first chart shows a sharp downtrend in other Coalition forces dropping in half from 25,000 to 12,000 since January 2005.

This chart shows US Troop strength from the beginning of the war. While the uptick since January is sharp, the current level of US troops is not far from the middle of the range it has been operating in for the past 3 years.

This is a chart using the calculated value showing the Other Coalition forces as a percentage of total troop strength. There has been a sharp decline over the past 3 years from a maximum of 17 percent down to the current value of approximately 7.5%.

This is another calculated chart showing how US troop strength has fluctuated around the 135,000 mark for the past few years. The current peak is lower than the two previous peaks.

The final chart shows total coalition forces in Iraq over the past 4 years. The current value of 160,000 looks like it is right in the middle of the operational range for this factor since the beginning of the war.

Iraq Index from Brookings Inst.

Here is a sampling of what I think are the most important trend charts from the Brookings Institution's June 4th edition of Michael O'Hanlon's Iraq Index. This weekly report is still covers the widest range of Iraq trend metrics in a single place that I know of. Many of these are displayed in trend charts. Other important metrics appear in tabular form or in text description. Check out the whole report (60+ pages) for all the details.

Chart 1 - Iraqi Military and Police appear to be becoming more involved in recent months based on this chart showing their fatality rate rising.

Chart 2 - Slight downturn overall recently but still high. I would prefer to see these three factors separately so I could discern individual trends. Would also be useful to be able to normalize a given category's rate as a percentage of the total rate of attack. Rich data such as these are good when presented statically, but even better when there is a chance to interact with them (e.g. as we did in yesterday's post showing the Wall Street Journal's interactive chart on housing trends).


This chart shows the recent rapid ramp up in security stations and outposts


Stacked bars can be interesting. In addition, it regularly proves helpful to be able to examine the individual components.

This data looks like it is a very important dis-aggregation that will bring added insight to what's going on. It would be great if the data from previous years could be reconstructed and added to give more perspective.
This important chart covers the full period from the beginning of the war. My own preference would be to drop the labels with the totals for each month. I think these clutter up the chart and would be best to keep in a table for those who are interested. Since the month to month is so variable, a 3 or 4 month moving average might be a useful addition. My own preference would be to plot the non-hostile fatalities separately for greater clarity regarding any trends that might be present in that data. The disparity of scale between the two factors makes interpretation of the smaller values more difficult.

Another important chart which also covers the full time range since the beginning of the war. I believe a moving average would also help present this data more thoroughly.

While his data on the growing prison population is important and seriously under-reported elsewhere, it only appears as a table in this month's report. A chart for this factor would prove even more helpful. In addition, it would be useful to know the trends in other related criminal justice factors such as:

• number in custody who have been charged and indicted
• number currently undergoing trial
• number found guilty, sentenced and serving time
• number awaiting indictment
• number awaiting trial
• average number of months before indictment/trialAnother full time period chart. The pair of factors and the dual y axis work well together in this case. My view is that a moving average would be helpful in this situation as well.
  

Michael O'Hanlon Year over Year Iraq Update

Here's a recent Michael O'Hanlon New York Times article which includes year over year table showing some 17 trend metrics from Feb 2004, year by year through Feb 2007.

The State of Iraq: An Update:

We plan to graph some of the more interesting of these trends in a future post to see what patterns we can discover that may be hiding in the data once we have transformed the posted table into a more readily reusable format for further investigation and discussion.