Management of Complex Data Structures: Upgrades to EUGene data software

自1998年首次推出以来，软件程序尤金已成为分析国际冲突和危机数据的学者的有用工具，提供了简单易用的数据集构建工具。 该提案中的软件开发将进一步扩展尤金计划，将其应用扩展为开发国际关系，比较政治和比较政治经济数据的工具。 持续的项目开发将专注于数据管理引擎的全面重新设计，以开发更灵活的新数据集和研究设计，更好地满足当代研究需求。 该程序使一组繁琐而困难的数据准备任务成为常规，并跟踪用户所做的关键研究设计选择。 这有助于学者进行更深入的研究和理论化，使他们不必进行技术数据操作。 与以前的版本一样，PI将研究生和本科生程序员整合到项目中，并监督签约的专业软件工程师。 尤金将使有经验的研究人员作为本科生和研究生在培训中受益。 在这次扩展中，重点是五个关键的新增加，这将促进未来的科学理解和发现，同时建立在现有的工作。 该软件将免费分发一个点和点击用户界面。 开发团队将添加五个新的程序属性，以扩大现有软件的影响。1.开发一种观测格式，放宽目前对一元或二元数据的限制，允许进行k元研究设计。 使用二元数据来分析实际上是k-adic的事件会导致模型的错误指定，并且不可避免地会导致大量的统计偏差。 2.允许用户指定观察单位。 用户还可以选择时间元素，例如每日、每周、每月、每季度或每年的数据。 用户可以选择单位，包括国家、监察办、恐怖组织、MID或任何用户指定的非国家行为者。 3. 开发一个扩展的采样引擎，以适应新数据结构将产生的大量增加的观测数据。 4. 内置一个扩展的缩放和测量引擎，允许用户应用主成分分析和因子分析来构建广泛的量表和指数，如NOMINATE和S得分。5. 开发空间回归分析所需的数据处理例程，以控制用户数据中的空间相互依赖性。 此外尤金4.0将包括最新发布的各种现有数据集。

Since it was first made available in 1998, the software program EUGene has become a useful tool for scholars who analyze international conflict and crisis data by providing simple to use tools for dataset construction. The software development laid out in this proposal will further expand the EUGene program, broadening its application into a tool for developing international relations, comparative politics, and comparative political economy data. Continued program development will focus on a complete redesign of the data management engine to allow for the development of new, more flexible datasets and research designs that better fit contemporary research needs. The program makes routine a set of data preparation tasks that are cumbersome and difficult, and keeps track of critical research design choices made by users. This facilitates more advanced research and theorizing by scholars by freeing them of the necessity to perform technical data manipulations. AS in coding previous versions, the PI's integrate graduate and undergraduate student programmers into the project as well as supervising contracted professional software engineers. EUGENE will benefit both experienced researchers as undergraduate and graduate students in training. In this expansion, the focus is on five key new additions that will advance future scientific understanding and discovery, while building on existing work. The software will be freely distributed with a point and click user interface. The development team will add five new program attributes to broaden the impacts of the exiting software. 1. Develop an observational format that relaxes the current restrictions of monadic or dyadic data allowing for k-adic research designs. Using dy-adic data to analyze what are, in reality, k-adic events leads to model misspecification and, inevitably, substantial statistical bias. 2. Allow users to specify the unit of observation. Users will also be able to select the temporal element, e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual data. Users will be able to choose the units including the country, the IGO, the terrorist group, MID, or any user specified non-state actor. 3. Develop an expanded sampling engine to accommodate the greatly increased population of observations the new data structures will generate. 4. Build in an expanding scaling and measurement engine that allows users to apply principle component analysis and factor analysis towards the building of a wide range of scales and indices such as NOMINATE and S scores. 5. Develop the data handling routines needed for spatial regression analysis, to control for spatial interdependence in the user's data. In addition EUGene 4.0 will include the most recent releases of an expanding variety of pre-existing datasets.