PREDICTION OF INTERSTATE ARMED CONFLICTS IN WEST AFRICA USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES

In the paper, we tested three machine learning models to predict the occurrence of inter-state armed conflicts in West Africa. The data used was collected from various sources over the period from 1981 to 2018. The modeling was done using Python. Among the three developed models, it turned out that the random forest model was the most suitable for this prediction. The modeling revealed that two major categories of variables are the most relevant predictors: