The 2023/24 VIEWS prediction challenge
The Violence and Impacts Early-Warning System (VIEWS) team is committed to providing humanitarian groups with the earliest possible warnings to support anticipatory action and save lives. With the goal of improving the accuracy and
certainty of our forecasts, the VIEWS team is launching a new prediction challenge that seeks to forecast conflict intensity as a probability distribution over the outcome— thus taking the uncertainty of forecasts fully into account.
This initiative will enable better anticipation of conflict and ultimately help to minimize the impact of war on people’s lives.
Conflict intensity will be defined as the UCDP “best” estimates, aggregated to the country and PRIO-GRID units of analysis. The main forecasts will be for the ´true future’, that is each month in 2024, with auxiliary retrospective
predictions for the years 2018—21.
Prospective participants are asked to submit abstracts to
views-competition@prio.org by 1 June 2023 (extended deadline!). Preliminary forecasts will be requested by 25 September 2023, and final forecasts by 23 June 2024.
The challenge follows up on the success of the previous one — see our special issue Lessons from a Conflict Escalation Prediction Competition for the various outputs of that one.
The challenge follows up on the success of the previous one — see our special issue Lessons from a Conflict Escalation Prediction Competition for the various outputs of that one.
Data Structure
The diagram depicts the relationships between the .parquet files supplied at cm and pgm level for the four test windows, and in particular how the datasets containing predictors (represented by blue colours) should be stitched together for each window,
in order to forecast the corresponding actuals (represented by red colours).
With financial support from the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs and PREVIEW.
