The VIEWS Prediction Challenge 2023/2024
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, we launched a new prediction challenge in 2023 that challenged participants 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.
Learn more about the prediction challenge, explore the forecasts from the participating teams in the data dashboard, read the introduction article, and consult the model papers below.
The 2023/24 edition of the VIEWS Prediction Challenge is funded by the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs and PREVIEW.
Learn more about the VIEWS 2023/2024 Prediction Challenge
Explore forecasts from the submitted prediction models and the VIEWS benchmark models
Browse all publications from the project.
The Challenge
Seeking to enhance the potential of harnessing early warning for early action, we invited teams across the world to develop models that could forecast fatalities as a probability distribution over the predicted outcome (the UCDP “best”
estimates of fatalities from state-based armed conflict, aggregated to the VIEWS units of analysis) and thus help inform end users not only of what the most likely outcome would be at a given time and place, but also alert
them to any low but alarming risks that may lie ahead.
Timeline
- 1 June 2023: Abstracts due from all participants.
- 25 September 2023: Preliminary forecasts (data), short summary of the model(s), and working papers presenting methods and preliminary forecasts due.
- 23 June 2024: Final submissions due with forecasts for the true future (July 2024-June 2025) and all test windows (2018-2023), short summary of the model, and final versions of the model papers.
- 1 July 2024: Start of forecasting window for the true future. Launch of the VIEWS Prediction Challenge dashboard displaying forecasts from all submitted models and the VIEWS benchmarks.
- End of August 2024: Evaluations of forecasts for the first month of the true future window will be calculated by the VIEWS team and released on the dedicated dashboard.
- September 2024 – June 2025: Running evaluations of submitted forecasts upon the monthly releases of UCDP Candidate Events data. Results will be released on the dedicated data dashboard.
- 30 June 2025: End of the forecasting window for the true future.
Resources for participants
Publications
Read the introduction article (preprint) and the working papers documenting the submitted models below. Listed in alphabetical order.
Introduction article
Hegre et al., (Forthcoming)
Preprint, June 2024
Model papers
Tobias Bodentien and Lotta Rüter
Working Paper, June 2024
Simon Drauz and Friederike Becker
Working Paper, June 2024
Cornelius Fritz, Christoph Dworschak, and Marius Mehrl
Working Paper, June 2024
Luca Macis, Marco Tagliapietra, Elena Siletti, and Paola Pisano
Working Paper, June 2024
Alexandra Málaga, Hannes Mueller, Christopher Rauh, and Benjamin Seimon
Working Paper, June 2024
Working Paper, June 2024
Daniel Mittermaier, Tobias Bohne, and Martin Hofer
David Muchlinski and Chandler Thornhill
Working Paper, June 2024
Vito D’Orazio
Working Paper, June 2024
David Randahl and Johan Vegelius
Working Paper, June 2024
Thomas Schincariol, Hannah Frank, and Thomas Chadefaux
Working Paper, June 2024
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Finn Klebe, and Nils W. Metternich
Working Paper, June 2024
Julian Walterskirchen, Sonja Häffner, Christian Oswald, and Marco Binetti
Working Paper, June 2024
With financial support from the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs and PREVIEW.
