Code for The Contagion of Mass Shootings: The Interdependence of Large-Scale Massacres and Mass Media Coverage

Purpose

This code performs self-exciting point process modeling and analysis of the dataset of US Mass Shootings discussed in the paper "The Contagion of Mass Shootings: The Interdependence of Large-Scale Massacres and Mass Media Coverage" published in Statistics and Public Policy by James Alan Fox, Nathan E. Sanders, Emma E. Fridel, Grant Duwe, and Michael Rocque. It reproduces all figures and statistics presented in that paper, as well as some additional related outputs.

Usage

To run this code,

1. Establish a conda environment using the environment.yml file.
2. Run hawkes_contagion.py with python3.

Contents

• hawkes_contagion.py - Primary entry point. This script reproduces all analysis and outputs associated with the paper.
• util.py - Utilities and function definitions used by hawkes_contagion.py
• model_params.py - Specification of data I/O paths and model configurations associated with the analysis. You can edit this to run the self-exciting point process model in additional configurations, e.g. with other variables.
• environment.yml - Conda environment specification
• data/2020-07-17_contagion_data.csv - Final input data file for hawkes_contagion.py used in the published version of the analysis.
• data/grid_search_model_results.jl - Serialized output of fitted models from the parameter grid simulation.
• copy_figures.sh - Map (copy) figures from the output of hawkes_contagion.py to their names/positions from the final published paper.
• submission_plots/ - Final versions of figures included in the published paper, as mapped by copy_figures.sh