jfedgerton/geoconflict-encoder-mini

UCDP Mini Spatial Event Encoder (ucdp_M)

A small transformer encoder that learns representations of location-months from UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED) event histories. Each PRIO-GRID 0.5 degree cell-month is represented by its trailing 12-month sequence of organized-violence events (type of violence, dyad sides, fatality bin, month offset), encoded with masked-event modeling. The CLS embedding is a general-purpose representation for conflict forecasting and transfer learning: fine-tune it for incidence forecasting, rebel/state violence, escalation, or related event-based tasks.

• Architecture: field embeddings -> concat-project -> [CLS] + TransformerEncoder (4 layers, 8 heads, d=128), masked-event-modeling objective.
• Unit: PRIO-GRID 0.5 deg cell-month; max 200 events per sequence; seed 123.
• Training data: UCDP GED 25.1 (1989-2024), the open (CC BY 4.0) georeferenced event dataset of organized violence.

Usage

from modeling_ucdp import load_encoder
model, cfg = load_encoder(".")
# seq: LongTensor [B, 200, 5] (ids per ucdp_vocab.json; 0 = pad)
# mask: BoolTensor [B, 200] (True = real event)
z = model.encode_sequence(seq, mask)   # [B, 128] cell-month embeddings

License and attribution

Model weights and code: CC BY-NC 4.0. Training data is the UCDP GED (CC BY 4.0). If you use this model, cite UCDP:

• Davies, S., Pettersson, T., Sollenberg, M., & Oberg, M. (2025). Organized violence 1989-2024, and the challenges of identifying civilian victims. Journal of Peace Research 62(4).
• Sundberg, R. & Melander, E. (2013). Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset. Journal of Peace Research 50(4).

Limitations

• UCDP GED covers organized violence with at least one fatality; protests and non-lethal events are not included. Coverage reflects media/source reporting.
• The encoder is a research artifact for representation learning and forecasting research. It is not suitable for operational targeting or safety-critical use.
• Embeddings reflect historical reporting patterns and inherit their biases.