Rationale

As of 31 December 2015, how many refugees and migrants will UNHCR report as having arrived in Europe by sea? Europe is facing a refugee crisis […]. Question will be resolved using the data available on UNHCR’s Emergency Response Page for the Mediterranean as of 31 December 2015 (http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.html ).

– from an Open Good Judgment Question

The code is in the public domain and I encourage you to play! (CC BY 3.0) Roland Kofler. Any Idea how to improve? Contact me via Gmail: my name separated by a dot.

Source on GitHub

Found the freaking raw data

Its all about Lesbos!

Facts

October=10 
September=9   #you get the idea
reportedAmount=723221
aMillion=10^6
N=10000;
arrivals2014= c(3270, 4369, 7283, 17084, 16627, 26221, 28303, 33478, 33944, 23050, 13318, 9107)
arrivals2015= c( 5546,  7343,   10184,  29441,  40117,  53987,  75483,  130837, 172843, 197440)
lesbosArrivals2014= c(290, 413, 555, 620, 461, 824, 873, 1064, 1778, 2072, 959, 802)
lesbosArrivals2015= c(737, 1002, 3348, 4990, 7228, 14796, 23721, 56579, 95384, 124698)

syrianRefugees=4000000

Data Analysis

arrivalsFor2Years <- c(arrivals2014, arrivals2015)
arrivalTimeseries <- ts(arrivalsFor2Years, start=c(2014, 1), end=c(2015, 10), frequency=12)

lesbosArrivalsFor2Years <- c(lesbosArrivals2014, lesbosArrivals2015)
lesbosTimeseries <- ts(lesbosArrivalsFor2Years, start=c(2014, 1), end=c(2015, 10), frequency=12)

Monthplots

They are looking as nobody can stop the trend Lesbos is the main door to the EU, being the greatest Island of the EU only a few km ashore of Turkey it is reachable with a dingi boat

monthplot(arrivalTimeseries)

monthplot(lesbosTimeseries)

#library(forecast)
#seasonplot(arrivalTimeseries) 
#seasonplot(lesbosTimeseries)

Extreme situation in Lesbos

plot(lesbosArrivals2015/ lesbosArrivals2014[1:10], type = 'o', main="Lesbos 2015 vs Lesbos 2014")

plot(lesbosArrivalsFor2Years/arrivalsFor2Years, type = 'o', main="How Lesbos became the door to Europe", xlab="month since Jan 2014", ylab="% of Lesbos Refugees to Total")

Monte Carlo Simulation

model parameters

mean1=0.6
mean2=0.5
standardDeviation= 0.35
weight1= rnorm(N, mean=mean1, sd=standardDeviation)
weight2= rnorm(N, mean=mean2, sd=standardDeviation)

Calculations

arrivalsNovember = arrivals2015[October] * weight1
arrivalsDecember = arrivals2015[October] * weight2 
futureArrivals= arrivalsNovember + arrivalsDecember
refugeesAmount = reportedAmount + futureArrivals
plot(refugeesAmount)
abline(h=aMillion, col="red");

overAmillion = refugeesAmount > 10^6
ProbabilityOverMillion= sum(overAmillion)/N
print (ProbabilityOverMillion * 100)
## [1] 27.38