Ep. 198: Chris Rauh on How to Use AI to Predict Conflicts

Chris Rauh is a Professor of Economics and Data Science at the University of Cambridge. He works with complex datasets and applied methodologies, including machine learning and structural modelling. He co-founded conflictforecast.org and has conducted projects for Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the German Foreign Office, and the IMF. He’s also listed amongst the top 1% of Economists in terms of research output in the last ten years. This episode’s podcast covers:

The hard problem of predicting conflicts
Defining conflicts: wars, civil wars, terrorism
Does the theory of conflict match reality
Using news to predict conflicts
Do commodity price swings matter?
Best machine learning approach to use
Model significantly outperforms baseline models
Latest countries to watch
Research on parenting styles
Books mentioned: The Invention of Nature (Wulf), Slaughterhouse 5 (Vonnegut)

You can follow Chris here and here. His conflict prediction site is here.

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