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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