A Bayesian forecasting model of international conflict

Abstract

<jats:p> Scholars and practitioners in international relations have a strong interest in forecasting international conflict. However, due to the complexity of forecasting rare events, existing attempts to predict the onset of international conflict in a cross-national setting have generally had low rates of success. In this paper, we apply Bayesian methods to develop a forecasting model designed to predict the onset of international conflict at the yearly level. We find that this model performs substantially better at producing accurate predictions both in and out of sample. </jats:p>