Understanding peacefulness through the world news
  Peacefulness is a principal dimension of well-being and is the way out of
inequity and violence. Thus, its measurement has drawn the attention of
researchers, policymakers, and peacekeepers. During the last years, novel
digital data streams have drastically changed the research in this field. The
current study exploits information extracted from a new digital database called
Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) to capture peacefulness
through the Global Peace Index (GPI). Applying predictive machine learning
models, we demonstrate that news media attention from GDELT can be used as a
proxy for measuring GPI at a monthly level. Additionally, we use explainable AI
techniques to obtain the most important variables that drive the predictions.
This analysis highlights each country's profile and provides explanations for
the predictions, and particularly for the errors and the events that drive
these errors. We believe that digital data exploited by researchers,
policymakers, and peacekeepers, with data science tools as powerful as machine
learning, could contribute to maximizing the societal benefits and minimizing
the risks to peacefulness.
