Past Events
Guest Workshops - November 2024
In November 2024 the PaCE Team hosted visiting speakers, Sverke R. Saxegaard & Eric G. E. Nilsen, PhD Research Fellows, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway.
"Sensitivity Analysis of Determinants of Conflict Onset"
What country-characteristics are robustly correlated with intrastate conflict onset? Numerous studies have over the last three decades sought to establish the determinants of intrastate conflict. In 2006, Hegre and Sambanis showed that a number of these findings were not robust. Since then, new studies have identified altogether new variables that ostensibly are determinants of intrastate conflict onset. Moreover, contemporary civil conflict has been described as fundamentally different than before, begging the question of whether their determinants are also different. This paper takes stock of the last twenty years of quantitative research on the determinants of intrastate conflict onset, by conducting a systematic sensitivity analysis of 144 individual variables. The results of the approximately 18 million regression models indicate that a vast majority of established patterns and relationships in the literature are not robust to model specifications.
Guest Seminar: Dr Cornelius Fritz
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Statistics, Pennsylvania State University, United States of America
Wednesday 31 January 2024
"Three-stage hierarchical hurdle count model for conflict forecasting."
In my research, I use statistics to learn from such network data to answer questions posed within the social sciences in uncertain and changing environments. My research mainly originates from multidisciplinary collaborations with social scientists approaching me with data and questions revolving around networks. As a statistician, I operate in two worlds: the real world, which encompasses observed data with all its imperfections and substantive knowledge of the subject matter, and the model world, which is an artificial representation of the real world characterized by a stochastic model. I develop novel data analysis techniques by combining statistical and machine learning with substantive theory to bridge the gap between the real and model world.
Advances in Social Science Forecasting
Guest Speaker: Professor Galit Shmueli
Tsing Hua Distinguished Professor and Institute Director at the College of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
Tuesday 21 March 2023
"Forks over knives: Predictive inconsistency in criminal justice algorithmic risk assessment tools."
Big data and algorithmic risk prediction tools promise to improve criminal justice systems by reducing human biases and inconsistencies in decision-making. Yet different, equally justifiable choices when developing, testing and deploying these socio-technical tools can lead to disparate predicted risk scores for the same individual. In this talk Prof. Galit Shmueli explored the challenges of 'predictive inconsistency', arguing that in a diverse and pluralistic society we should not expect to completely eliminate predictive inconsistency, but identify and document reasonable 'forking paths'.
