Replication data for: Location, Location, Location: An MCMC Approach to Modeling the Spatial Context of War & Peace

We introduce the idea of an autologistic model where the response for one observation is dependent on the value of the response among adjacent observations. The autologistic model has likelihood function that is mathematically intractable, since the observations are conditionally dependent upon one another.

We review alternative techniques for estimating this model, with special emphasis on recent advances using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. We evaluate a highly simplified autologistic model of conflict where the likelihood of war involvement for each nation is conditional on the war involvement of proximate states. We estimate this autologistic model for a single year (1988) via maximum pseudolikelihood and MCMC maximum likelihood methods.