NOVAFRICA Seminar: “Predicting conflict”

On Friday, April 22th, at 02.30pm (Lisbon time), on Room D -115 the NOVAFRICA Center welcomes Christopher Rauh from the University of Cambridge to present his work on Predicting conflict.

Author:
Christopher Rauh

Abstract:
In this project we propose a framework to tackle conflict prevention, an issue which has received interest in several policy areas. A key challenge of conflict forecasting for prevention is that outbreaks of conflict in previously peaceful countries are rare events and therefore hard to predict. To make progress in this hard problem, this project summarizes more than five million newspaper articles using a topic model. The topics are then fed into a random forest to predict conflict risk. We are currently advancing our research agenda in two directions. First, we are predicting conflict not only at the country, but also at the local level while taking into consideration geo-spatial features of conflict. Second, we are integrating our predictions into a framework in which a decision maker decides on the optimal timing of interventions to minimize the total cost of conflict and intervention. This presentation will give an overview of the work in progress.

Find more about this seminar here.