Prevention Is Better Than Cure: Machine Learning Approach to Conflict Prediction in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

This article offers policymakers and researchers pragmatic and sustainable approaches to identify and mitigate conflict threats by looking beyond p-values and plausible instruments. We argue that predicting conflict successfully depends on the choice of algorithms, which, if chosen accurately, can reduce economic and social instabilities caused by post-conflict reconstruction. After collating data with variables linked to conflict, we used a grid level dataset of 5928 observations spanning 48 countries across sub-Saharan Africa to predict civil conflict. The goals of the study were to assess the performance of supervised classification machine learning (ML) algorithms in comparison with logistic model, assess the implication of selecting a specific performance metric on policy initiatives, and evaluate the value of interpretability of the selected model. After comparing class imbalance resampling methods, the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) was employed to improve out-of-sample prediction for the trained model. The results indicate that if our selected performance metric is recall, gradient tree boosting is the best algorithm; however, if precision or F1 score is the selected metric, then the multilayer perceptron algorithm produces the best model.