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.
The challenge is outlined in more detail in this invitation. The 2023/24 iteration follows up on the success of the previous prediction challenge — see our special issue Lessons from a Conflict Escalation Prediction Competition for the various outputs of that one.
For information, please consult our website: https://viewsforecasting.org/prediction-competition-2/
With financial support from the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs and PREVIEW.
