Forecasting conflict using RNNs

Abstract: The rise in machine learning has made the subject interesting for new types of uses. This Master thesis implements and evaluates an LSTM-based algorithm on the conflict forecasting problem. Data is structured in country-month pairs, with information about conflict, economy, demography, democracy and unrest. The goal is to forecast the probability of at least one conflict event in a country based on a window of historic information. Results show that the model is not as good as a Random Forest. There are also indications of a lack of data with the network having difficulty performing consistently and with learning curves not flattening. Naive models perform surprisingly well. The conclusion is that the problem needs some restructuring in order to improve performance compared to naive approaches. To help this endeavourpossible paths for future work has been identified.