The COW data set
What started as a venture to an extensively detailed data set which came courtesy from the Centre of War, which documents more than 1700 inter-state conflicts, looking for correlations between the economic or political nature of a country and its probability of escalating a conflict from a diplomatic to an agressive conflict. Actually turned out more to be an investigation into data leakage and well also some pretty D3 visulatisations to boot.
The objective
Initially I stumbled across the dataset and impressed by its depth and detail. I looked at what sort of analysis or predictability could be gleamed from data that charts every inter-state conflict from 1813 to 2010! I decided to investigate the predictability of the level of conflict (a range from 0-5 from withdrawal of diplomats to full on armed conflict). Using and developing features, based on the socio-economics features of the country as well as its military prowess.
The Data set
The wonderful data set essentially consitsts of:
