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Armed conflict has contributed to an unprecedented number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) - individuals who are forced out of their homes but remain within their country. IDPs often urgently require shelter, food, and healthcare, yet prediction of when fluxes of IDPs will cross into an area remains a major challenge for aid delivery organizations. We sought to develop an approach to more accurately forecast IDP migration that could empower humanitarian aid groups to more effectively allocate resources during conflicts. We modeled monthly IDP flow between provinces within Syria and within Yemen using heterogeneous data on food prices, fuel prices, wages, location, time, and conflict reports. We show that our machine learning approach outperforms baseline persistence methods of forecasting. Integrating diverse data sources into machine learning models thus appears to improve IDP migration prediction.
Author Information
Benjamin Huynh (Stanford University)
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2018 : Poster session: Contributed papers »
Michael Cvitkovic · Arijit Patra · Yunpeng Li · RAHMAN BANYA SAFF SANYA · Guanghua Chi · Benjamin Huynh · Hamed Alemohammad · Simón Ramírez Amaya · Nazmus Saquib · Jade Abbott · Teo de Campos · Viraj Prabhu · Alvaro Riascos · Hafte Abera · praney dubey · Tanushyam Chattopadhyay · Hsiang Hsu · Mayank Jain · Kartikeya Bhardwaj · Gabriel Cadamuro · Bradley Gram-Hansen · Georg Dorffner