From 9-11 October 2023, the VIEWS Prediction Competition Workshop took place in Berlin, Germany, hosted by the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO) and their PREVIEW Group (Prediction, Visualisation, Early Warning).
In her opening remarks, Anke Feldhausen, Director of Crisis Prevention and Stabilisation at FFO, underlined the need for planning ahead of time to both save lives, and make policy interventions and diplomatic tools more cost effective.
On behalf of the VIEWS Team, Håvard Hegre presented the VIEWS System and Prediction Competition, while Michael Colaresi elaborated on the evaluation metrics used on behalf of the Scoring Committee. Paola Vesco also presented the preliminary evaluations of the 14 submissions.
The workshop was primarily a forum for the 14 teams to present their prediction models and receive feedback from each other, the VIEWS team, and the scoring committee.
The presentations were grouped into 5 substantive panels:
- Hurdle and zero-inflated models
- Bayesian and Markov modelling
- Decision-tree based models and news data
- Deep learning and Machine learning
- Transformers
At the end of the workshop, lessons learned were shared – among others, on the importance of considering different evaluation metrics, having use cases in mind, and thinking about how to communicate and visualise the uncertainty of the models.
For more information on the teams’ presentations, have a look at our Twitter threads from Day 1 and Day 2 below!