Related papers: Common indicators hurt armed conflict prediction
The deterrent effect of military alliances is well documented and widely accepted. However, such work has typically assumed that alliances are exogenous. This is problematic as alliances may simultaneously influence the probability of…
This paper explores the spatial and temporal diffusion of political violence in North and West Africa. It does so by endeavoring to represent the mental landscape that lives in the back of a group leader's mind as he contemplates strategic…
Understanding the origins of militarized conflict is a complex, yet important undertaking. Existing research seeks to build this understanding by considering bi-lateral relationships between entity pairs (dyadic causes) and multi-lateral…
Prediction of events is the challenge in many different disciplines, from meteorology to finance; the more this task is difficult, the more a system is {\it complex}. Nevertheless, even according to this restricted definition, a general…
Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…
In this paper, we analyze the long-term distributive impact of climate change through rising food prices. We use a standard incomplete markets model and account for non-linear Engel curves for food consumption. For the calibration of our…
The robustness of neural networks is challenged by adversarial examples that contain almost imperceptible perturbations to inputs, which mislead a classifier to incorrect outputs in high confidence. Limited by the extreme difficulty in…
Conflicts, like many social processes, are related events that span multiple scales in time, from the instantaneous to multi-year developments, and in space, from one neighborhood to continents. Yet, there is little systematic work on…
Observable social traits determine how we interact in society and remain pervasive even in our globalized world. While a popular hypothesis states that they may help promote cooperation, the alternative explanation that they facilitate…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) of news articles can play an important role in understanding the dynamics and causes of violent conflict. Despite the availability of datasets categorizing various conflict events, the existing labels often…
I propose a new conceptual framework to disentangle the impacts of weather and climate on economic activity and growth: A stochastic frontier model with climate in the production frontier and weather shocks as a source of inefficiency. I…
Agonism plays a vital role in democratic dialogue by fostering diverse perspectives and robust discussions. Within the realm of online conflict there is another type: hateful antagonism, which undermines constructive dialogue. Detecting…
In this paper we introduce a class of stochastic population models based on "patch dynamics". The size of the patch may be varied, and this allows one to quantify the departures of these stochastic models from various mean field theories,…
Certain invasive plants may rely on interference mechanisms (allelopathy, e.g.) to gain competitive superiority over native species. But expending resources on interference presumably exacts a cost in another life-history trait, so that the…
Adversarial attacks dramatically change the output of an otherwise accurate learning system using a seemingly inconsequential modification to a piece of input data. Paradoxically, empirical evidence indicates that even systems which are…
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted every corner of earth, disrupting governments and leading to socioeconomic instability. This crisis has prompted questions surrounding how different sectors of society interact…
This chapter introduces flood and drought through the understanding of the water cycle. In addition to the water cycle, we consider the energy cycle. The floods and droughts have strong regional and seasonal characteristics. The causes of…
The interdependence between an individual strategy decision and the resulting change of environmental state is often a subtle process. Feedback-evolving games have been a prevalent framework for studying such feedback in well-mixed…
Many popular algorithmic fairness measures depend on the joint distribution of predictions, outcomes, and a sensitive feature like race or gender. These measures are sensitive to distribution shift: a predictor which is trained to satisfy…
Epidemiologists aiming to model the dynamics of global events face a significant challenge in identifying the factors linked with anomalies such as disease outbreaks. In this paper, we present a novel method for identifying the most…