On the 26th of October, two of last year’s project leaders at CAS, Nils Lid Hjort and Håvard Hegre, held a lecture at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Stability and Change
Stability and Change

Principal investigators
Abstract
The Stability and Change project aimed at and succeeded in fruitfully bringing together core groups of international top-level scholars from two different fields – those of (a) peace-and-conflict research, with associated themes from political science, and (b) methodological and applied statistics. Themes of clear shared interest for (a) and (b) include (i) modelling and analysis of of armed conflict, taking the special statistical features of violence data into account; (ii) unravelling key patterns which lead to higher risk for escalation, building upon relevant time series of violence and influential covariates; (iii) modelling, estimating, and understanding the heavy-tailed power-law distributions prevalent with violence data; (iv) how to combine information from partly very different data sources; (v) identification of trends and changepoints, e.g. regarding democracies and consequences thereof; (vi) how to count the not yet counted (as in casualties in wars); and (vii) predicting future levels of violence, along with adequate assessment of uncertainty.
Fellows











Affiliated researchers
Dennis
Christensen
Steffen
Grønneberg
Gudmund Horn
Hermansen
Aliaksandr
Hubin
Per August
Moen
Håvard Mokleiv
Nygård
Emil Aas
Stoltenberg
Håvard
Strand
Simon Polichinel
von der Maase
Chandler
Williams
News
Forecasting conflict intensity is a challenging exercise. Yet, it can save lives by enabling early warning systems. With the goal of improving the accuracy and certainty of forecasts, Håvard Hegre and the VIEWS team is launching a new prediction challenge.