Project_floodlight

Crisis incidents caused by rebel groups create a negative influence on the political and economic situation of a country. However, information about rebel group activities has always been limited. Sometimes these groups do not take responsibility for their actions, sometimes they falsely claim responsibility for other rebel group’s actions. This has made identifying the rebel group responsible for a crisis incident a significant challenge. Project Floodlight aims to utilize different machine learning techniques to understand and analyze activity patterns of 17 major rebel groups in Asia (including Taliban, Islamic State, and Al Qaeda). It uses classification algorithms such as Random Forest and XGBoost to predict the rebel group responsible for organizing a crisis event based on 14 different characteristics including number of fatalities, location, event type, and actor influenced. The dataset used comes from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) which is a disaggregated data collection, analysis and crisis mapping project. The dataset contains information on more than 78000 incidents caused by rebel groups that took place in Asia from 2017 to 2019. Roughly 48000 of these observations were randomly selected and used to develop and train the model. The final model had an accuracy score of 84% and an F1 Score of 82% on testing dataset of about 30000 new observations that the algorithm had never seen. The project was programmed using Object Oriented Programming in Python in order to make it scalable. Project Floodlight can be further expended to understand other crisis events in Asia and Africa such as protests, riots, or violence against women.