Predicting the Course of Military Disputes

Relative Number of Military Disputes from 1992-2010 by Country

Objective

An inter-state military dispute can be thought of as a series of incidents over time. Each incident has some hostility level associated with it, whether the incident be a threat (low hostility level), a blockade, or an attack (high hostility level). The goal of this project was to predict how the hostility level of a dispute would change over time - would it escalate, de-escalate, remain the same, or would there be no further incidents within 30 days?

Data

This project uses the following data from the Correlates of War Project:

1. COW Country Codes
2. Militarized Inter-state Disputes (v4.1)

• MID-level data
• Incident-level data

This project also uses a .csv of latitudes and longitudes for each country, created from this Google Dataset.