The internal mechanism of the social "earthquakes"-the wars burst in human society, is investigated by nonlinear theory. We explore the scaling behavior in the human activity and the historical evolution of ancient China. Based on the war chronology and history chronology from B.C.2000 to A.D.1840, using statistical analysis together with the detrended fluctuation analysis, we find that the social evolution system shows self-organized critical behavior and there exists self-similar scaling behavior during the evolution system. Based on time-delay reconstructed phase space, a modified radial basis function neural network (modified RBF-NN) is used to predict the number of wars and the transformation of the historical stage. It shows that the prediction result matches quite well with the real value for the following two historical stages. Furthermore, by singular value decomposition and the sparse identification algorithm in time-delay coordinates, the coefficients of the candidate functions in identified system can be solved from a sparse regression problem. We extracted the governing equations of big events burst in social system. The identified system fits well with the real data, and it can capture the same topology with the original system of wars. In this paper, we investigated the wars burst in social system by statistic analysis, neural network as well as sparse identification. It sheds light on the study of wars or conflicts from perspective of data science and dynamical theory. INDEX TERMS Scaling behavior, Self-organized criticality, Neural networks, System identification.