Introducing a global dataset on conflict forecasts and news topics

This article provides a structured description of openly available news topics and forecasts for armed conflict at the national and grid cell level starting January 2010. The news topics, as well as the forecasts, are updated monthly at conflictforecast.org and provide coverage for more than 170 cou...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Mueller, Hannes, Rauh, Christopher, Seimon, Ben
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Recursos:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/361464
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/361464
https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85188923320
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Civil war
Conflict
Forecasting
Machine learning
News topics
Random forest
Topic models
Descrição
Resumo:This article provides a structured description of openly available news topics and forecasts for armed conflict at the national and grid cell level starting January 2010. The news topics, as well as the forecasts, are updated monthly at conflictforecast.org and provide coverage for more than 170 countries and about 65,000 grid cells of size 55 × 55 km worldwide. The forecasts rely on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to leverage a large corpus of newspaper text for predicting sudden onsets of violence in peaceful countries. Our goals are a) to support conflict prevention efforts by making our risk forecasts available to practitioners and research teams worldwide, b) to facilitate additional research that can utilize risk forecasts for causal identification, and c) to provide an overview of the news landscape.