Modeling analysis of armed conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa, 2000–2019

Sub-Saharan Africa has suffered frequent outbreaks of armed conflict since the end of the Cold War. Although several efforts have been made to understand the underlying causes of armed conflict and establish an early warning mechanism, there is still a lack of a comprehensive assessment approach to model the incidence risk of armed conflict well. Based on a large database of armed conflict events and related spatial datasets covering the period 2000–2019, this study uses a boosted regression tree (BRT) approach to model the spatiotemporal distribution of armed conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa. Evaluation of accuracy indicates that the simulated models obtain high performance with an area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) mean value of 0.937 and an area under the precision recall curves (PR-AUC) mean value of 0.891. The result of the relative contribution indicates that the background context factors (i.e., social welfare and the political system) are the main driving factors of armed conflict risk, with a mean relative contribution of 92.599%. By comparison, the climate change-related variables have relatively little effect on armed conflict risk, accounting for only 7.401% of the total. These results provide novel insight into modelling the incidence risk of armed conflict, which may help implement interventions to prevent and minimize the harm of armed conflict.