All posts tagged Early Warning Project

Positive Feedback Junkie

Yesterday, while grabbing a last half-cup of coffee after an event about political risk assessment, I met a guy who told me he used to work as a futures trader.

“What’s that like?” I asked him.

“Everyone’s different,” he said, and then described a few of the work routines and trading strategies he and his former colleagues had followed.

As he talked about the lifestyle, I recognized some of my own habits. Right now, I’m actively forecasting on at least five different platforms. Together, three of those—the Early Warning Project’s opinion pool, the Good Judgment Project, and Inkling’s public prediction market—cover an almost-absurd array of events and processes around the world, from political violence to trade agreements, election outcomes, and sporting contests. To try to do well on all of those platforms, I have to follow news from as many sources as I can about all kinds of places and organizations. I also forecast on this blog. Here, the prognostications are mostly annual, but they’re public, too, so the results directly affect my professional reputation. The events I forecast here are also rare, so the reputational consequences of a hit or miss will often linger for weeks or months. The fifth platform—the stock market—requires yet-another information set and involves my own real money.

One of the things the Good Judgment Project has found is that subject-matter expertise isn’t reliably associated with higher forecasting accuracy, but voraciously consuming the news and frequently updating your forecasts are. The term “information junkie” comes to mind, and I think the junkie part may be more relevant than we let on. When you’re trying to anticipate the news, there’s a physiological response, an amped-up feeling you get when events are moving quickly in a situation about which you’ve made a forecast. I recognize that cycle of lulls and rushes from a short flirtation with online, play-money poker more than a decade ago, and I sometimes get it now when a blog post gets a burst of attention. When things are slow and nothing relevant seems to be happening, there’s an edginess that persists and pulls you into searching for new information, new opportunities to forecast, new levers to push and then wait for the treat to drop. I’ve also noticed that this feeling gets amplified by Twitter. There, I can see fresh information roll by in real time, like a stock ticker for geopolitics if you follow the right mix of people. I can also chase little rushes by dropping my own tweets into the mix and then watching for retweets, responses, and favorites.

When I started college, I thought I would major in biology. I had really enjoyed math and science in high school, had done well in them, and imagined making a career out of those interests and what seemed like talents. First semester of freshman year, I took vector calculus and chemistry. I also behaved like a lot of college freshman, not working as hard as I had in high school and doing some other things that weren’t especially good for my cognitive skill and accumulation of knowledge. As the semester rolled by, I found that I wasn’t doing as well as I’d expected in those math and science classes, but I was doing very well in my social-science and Russian-language courses. After freshman year, I didn’t take another math or natural-science class in college, and I graduated three years later with a degree in comparative area studies.

Sometimes I regret my failure to chase that initial idea a little harder. When that happens, I explain that failure to myself as the result of a natural impulse to seek out and stay close to streams of positive feedback. I see the same impulse in my forecasting work, and I see it in my own and other people’s behavior on social media, too. It’s not freedom from stress we’re seeking. The absence of stress is boredom, and I don’t know anyone who can sit comfortably with that feeling for long. What I see instead is addictive behavior, the relentless chase for another hit. We’re okay with a little discomfort, as long as the possibility of the next rush hides behind it, and the rush doesn’t have to involve money to feel rewarding.

After the guy I met yesterday had described some traders’ work routines—most of which would probably sound great to people in lots of other jobs, and certainly to people without jobs—I asked him: “So why’d you leave it?”

“Got tired of always chasin’ the money,” he said.

3 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on November 4, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Forecasting

Tagged Early Warning Project, Good Judgment Project, Inkling

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on November 4, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/positive-feedback-junkie/

Why political scientists should predict

Last week, Hans Noel wrote a post for Mischiefs of Faction provocatively titled “Stop trying to predict the future“. I say provocatively because, if I read the post correctly, Noel’s argument deliberately refutes his own headline. Noel wasn’t making a case against forecasting. Rather, he was arguing in favor of forecasting, as long as it’s done in service of social-scientific objectives.

If that’s right, then I largely agree with Noel’s argument and would restate it as follows. Political scientists shouldn’t get sucked into bickering with their colleagues over small differences in forecast accuracy around single events, because those differences will rarely contain enough information for us to learn much from them. Instead, we should take prediction seriously as a means of testing competing theories by doing two things.

First, we should build forecasting models that clearly represent contrasting sets of beliefs about the causes and precursors of the things we’re trying to predict. In Noel’s example, U.S. election forecasts are only scientifically interesting in so far as they come from models that instantiate different beliefs about why Americans vote like they do. If, for example, a model that incorporates information about trends in unemployment consistently produces more accurate forecasts than a very similar model that doesn’t, then we can strengthen our confidence that trends in unemployment shape voter behavior. If all the predictive models use only the same inputs—polls, for example—we don’t leave ourselves much room to learn about theories from them.

In my work for the Early Warning Project, I have tried to follow this principle by organizing our multi-model ensemble around a pair of models that represent overlapping but distinct ideas about the origins of state-led mass killing. One model focuses on the characteristics of the political regimes that might perpetrate this kind of violence, while another focuses on the circumstances in which those regimes might find themselves. These models embody competing claims about why states kill, so a comparison of their predictive accuracy will give us a chance to learn something about the relative explanatory power of those competing claims. Most of the current work on forecasting U.S. elections follows this principle too, by the way, even if that’s not what gets emphasized in media coverage of their work.

Second, we should only really compare the predictive power of those models across multiple events or a longer time span, where we can be more confident that observed differences in accuracy are meaningful. This is basic statistics. The smaller the sample, the less confident we can be that it is representative of the underlying distribution(s) from which it was drawn. If we declare victory or failure in response to just one or a few bits of feedback, we risk “correcting” for an unlikely draw that dimly reflects the processes that really interest us. Instead, we should let the models run for a while before chucking or tweaking them, or at least leave the initial version running while trying out alternatives.

Admittedly, this can be hard to do in practice, especially when the events of interest are rare. All of the applied forecasters I know—myself included—are tinkerers by nature, so it’s difficult for us to find the patience that second step requires. With U.S. elections, forecasters also know that they only get one shot every two or four years, and that most people won’t hear anything about their work beyond a topline summary that reads like a racing form from the horse track. If you’re at all competitive—and anyone doing this work probably is—it’s hard not to respond to that incentive. With the Early Warning Project, I worry about having a salient “miss” early in the system’s lifespan that encourages doubters to dismiss the work before we’ve really had a chance to assess its reliability and value. We can be patient, but if our intended audiences aren’t too, then the system could fail to get the traction it deserves.

Difficult doesn’t mean impossible, however, and I’m optimistic that political scientists will increasingly use forecasting in service of their search for more useful and more powerful theories. Journal articles that take this idea seriously are still rare birds, especially on things other than U.S. elections, but you occasionally spot them (Exhibit A and B). As Drew Linzer tweeted in response to Noel’s post, “Arguing over [predictive] models is arguing over assumptions, which is arguing over theories. This is exactly what [political science] should be doing.”

3 Comments

by Jay Ulfelder on September 23, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Forecasting, Methods, Uncategorized

Tagged Drew Linzer, Early Warning Project, Hans Noel, Mischiefs of Faction

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on September 23, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/why-political-scientists-should-predict/

Machine learning our way to better early warning on mass atrocities

For the past couple of years, I’ve been helping build a system that uses statistics and expert crowds to assess and track risks of mass atrocities around the world. Recently dubbed the Early Warning Project (EWP), this effort already has a blog up and running (here), and the EWP should finally be able to launch a more extensive public website within the next several weeks.

One of the first things I did for the project, back in 2012, was to develop a set of statistical models that assess risks of onsets of state-led mass killing in countries worldwide, the type of mass atrocities for which we have the most theory and data. Consistent with the idea that the EWP will strive to keep improving on what it does as new data, methods, and ideas become available, that piece of the system has continued to evolve over the ensuing couple of years.

You can find the first two versions of that statistical tool here and here. The latest iteration—recently codified in new-and-improved replication materials—has performed pretty well, correctly identifying the few countries that have seen onsets of state-led mass killing in the past couple of years as relatively high-risk cases before those onsets occurred. It’s not nearly as precise as we’d like—I usually apply the phrase “relatively high-risk” to the Top 30, and we’ll only see one or two events in most years—but that level of imprecision is par for the course when forecasting rare and complex political crises like these.

Of course, a solid performance so far doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t try to do even better. Last week, I finally got around to applying a couple of widely used machine learning techniques to our data to see how those techniques might perform relative to the set of models we’re using now. Our statistical risk assessments come not from a single model but from a small collection of them—a “multi-model ensemble” in applied forecasting jargon—because these collections of models usually produce more accurate forecasts than any single one can. Our current ensemble mixes two logistic regression models, each representing a different line of thinking about the origins of mass killing, with one machine-learning algorithm—Random Forests—that gets applied to all of the variables used by those theory-specific models. In cross-validation, the Random Forests forecasts handily beat the two logistic regression models, but, as is often the case, the average of the forecasts from all three does even better.

Inspired by the success of Random Forests in our current risk assessments and by the power of machine learning in another project on which I’m working, I decided last week to apply two more machine learning methods to this task: support vector machines (SVM) and the k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm. I won’t explain the two techniques in any detail here; you can find good explanations elsewhere on the internet (see here and here, for example), and, frankly, I don’t understand the methods deeply enough to explain them any better.

What I will happily report is that one of the two techniques, SVM, appears to perform our forecasting task about as well as Random Forests. In five-fold cross-validation, both SVM and Random Forests both produced areas under the ROC curve (a.k.a. AUC scores) in the mid-0.80s. AUC scores range from 0.5 to 1, and a score in the mid-0.80s is pretty good for out-of-sample accuracy on this kind of forecasting problem. What’s more, when I averaged the estimates for each case from SVM and Random Forests, I got AUC scores in the mid– to upper 0.80s. That’s several points better than our current ensemble, which combines Random Forests with those logistic regression models.

By contrast, KNN did quite poorly, hovering close to the 0.5 mark that we would get with randomly generated probabilities. Still, success in one of the two experiments is pretty exciting. We don’t have a lot of forecasts to combine right now, so adding even a single high-quality model to the mix could produce real gains.

Mind you, this wasn’t a push-button operation. For one thing, I had to rework my code to handle missing data in a different way—not because SVM handles missing data differently from Random Forests, but because the functions I was using to implement the techniques do. (N.B. All of this work was done in R. I used ‘ksvm’ from the kernlab package for SVM and ‘knn3’ from the caret package for KNN.) I also got poor results from SVM in my initial implementation, which used the default settings for all of the relevant parameters. It took some iterating to discover that the Laplacian kernel significantly improved the algorithm’s performance, and that tinkering with the other flexible parameters (sigma and C for the Laplacian kernel in ksvm) had no effect or made things worse.

I also suspect that the performance of KNN would improve with more effort. To keep the comparison simple, I gave all three algorithms the same set of features and observations. As it happens, though, Random Forests and SVMs are less prone to over-fitting than KNN, which has a harder time separating the signal from the noise when irrelevant features are included. The feature set I chose probably includes some things that don’t add any predictive power, and their inclusion may be obscuring the patterns that do lie in those data. In the next go-round, I would start the KNN algorithm with the small set of features in whose predictive power I’m most confident, see if that works better, and try expanding from there. I would also experiment with different values of k, which I locked in at 5 for this exercise.

It’s tempting to spin the story of this exercise as a human vs. machine parable in which newfangled software and Big Data outdo models hand-crafted by scholars wedded to overly simple stories about the origins of mass atrocities. It’s tempting, but it would also be wrong on a couple of crucial points.

First, this is still small data. Machine learning refers to a class of analytic methods, not the amount of data involved. Here, I am working with the same country-year data set covering the world from the 1940s to the present that I have used in previous iterations of this exercise. This data set contains fewer than 10,000 observations on scores of variables and takes up about as much space on my hard drive as a Beethoven symphony. In the future, I’d like to experiment with newer and larger data sets at different levels of aggregation, but that’s not what I’m doing now, mostly because those newer and larger data sets still don’t cover enough time and space to be useful in the analysis of such rare events.

Second and more important, theory still pervades this process. Scholars’ beliefs about what causes and presages mass killing have guided my decisions about what variables to include in this analysis and, in many cases, how those variables were originally measured and the fact that data even exist on them at all. Those data-generating and variable-selection processes, and all of the expertise they encapsulate, are essential to these models’ forecasting power. In principle, machine learning could be applied to a much wider set of features, and perhaps we’ll try that some time, too. With events as rare as onsets of state-led mass killing, however, I would not have much confidence that results from a theoretically agnostic search would add real forecasting power and not just result in over-fitting.

In any case, based on these results, I will probably incorporate SVM into the next iteration of the Early Warning Project’s statistical risk assessments. Those are due out early in the spring of 2015, when all of the requisite inputs will have been updated (we hope). I think we’ll also need to think carefully about whether or not to keep those logistic regression models in the mix, and what else we might borrow from the world of machine learning. In the meantime, I’ve enjoyed getting to try out some new techniques on data I know well, where it’s a lot easier to tell if things are going wonky, and it’s encouraging to see that we can continue to get better at this hard task if we keep trying.