ML and Satellite Imagery for Conflict Prediction

Ensemble ML pipeline (RF, NN, KNN) achieving 92.3% accuracy and 0.93 ROC AUC, predicting violent conflict across Africa from satellite, climate, and socioeconomic data

Overview

Predicting conflict in Africa applies logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, random forest, and neural networks to grid-level features from UCDP, ERA5, Meta Relative Wealth Index, Hansen forest change, and VIIRS nighttime lights. A conservative ensemble balances recall and precision for early-warning–style use cases.

Demo and code

Authors

Andrés Felipe Camacho, Pablo Hernández Pedraza, Agustín Eyzaguirre — MSCAPP, University of Chicago.