Modeling and Prediction in Conflict: Afghanistan

This chapter applied the techniques of Chap. 2 to the WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary and follows closely the treatment in 2012a doi: 10.1073/pnas.1203177109. The chapter begins by giving an overview of the conflict in Afghanistan which began in 2001 and the WikiLeaks release. An exploratory study of the data set is given which includes consistency checks, a non-parametric analysis and an evaluation of fixed effects (e.g. population density) on the conflict intensity. Results from the non-parametric analysis are used to elicit a spatio-temporal model which is then reduced to a state-space model amenable to the algorithms of Chap. 2. The chapter proceeds to discuss the results and show how important information, such as statistical descriptions of escalation and volatility, may be extracted from the analysis. The chapter concludes by assessing prediction accuracy and showing that uncertainty has been reliably quantified using this approach.