Due Thu, Feb 18

In this assignment you will investigate fatality of police shootings for Black victims in the United States. You will use data collected by reporters at VICE News on police shootings in the 50 largest police departments in the US between 2010 and 2016 for the article Shot by cops and forgotten. The data was made available on VICE News’ Github repository.

1. First, grab and clean up the data. (3 points)

4. Finally, you want look more closely at the role of the interaction term you included in the previous model. Specify and estimate a final model that includes the same predictor variables as before (whether the victim was Black and whether the victim was armed), but do not include the interaction term. Use the Widely Applicable Information Criterion (WAIC) to discuss the relative predictive power of the model with and without the interaction. (Note: you will need to include the extra argument log_lik=TRUE in your ulam() command for any models you want to calculate the WAIC for—you can add it to the code for your previous responses). What do you conclude about the interaction term. Should you include it in the model? Why or why not? (4 points)