VIEWS-Startup

Patrick T. Brandt

Professor of Political Science

University of Texas, Dallas

This is a simple demo for getting started with the VIEWS data in R. It covers the following topics (among others):

Getting Started with the VIEWS data tutorial

Learning about Tweedie and Exponential Dispersion Models

Practical Forecast Scoring

It lets you do things like

1. Download the basic cm or country-month data
2. Setup the data
3. Make some basic time series and distribution plots.
4. Evaluates parametric density changes in the data using Tweedie models.
5. Generate some forecasts over a training set.
6. Compare the forecasts from the training set model to actual data.

This is not an R tutorial. It assumes you already can use some of R and want to focus on the logic of machine learning for forecasting this problem.

Other relevant documents to understand the data are here:

VIEWS Data Codebooks Link

VIEWS cm country-month data codebook

VIEWS pgm PRIO grid-month data codebook

Acknowledgments

• Support has been provided by NSF Award 2311142. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

• This has been improved with feedback from Vito D'Orazio, Salma Khalfallah, and Prasiddha Siwakoti