Forecasting and risk systems for hard‑to‑measure problems
Basil Analytics is my independent practice. I’m an applied scientist with fifteen years of experience building geopolitical forecasting systems and political event data — work like estimating the risk of irregular leadership change, democratic backsliding, or conflict, where outcomes are rare, signal is weak, and even human experts disagree.
I work with government, research, and risk/intelligence teams to design, build, and run these systems end to end. I’m currently developing a production political event data service with two partners, to fill the gap left by the discontinued ICEWS and POLECAT datasets.
Services
- Forecasting and risk-modeling systems
- Ground-up design and implementation, from data acquisition and cleaning through modeling to delivery: monthly reports, written briefings, or a running service.
- Political event data and NLP pipelines
- Extracting structured event records from news text: ontology design, annotation programs and inter-annotator agreement, geocoding, and ML/LLM-based classification in production.
- Data and measurement validation
- Finding where the data, not the model, is the binding constraint, and building monitoring that catches it.
- Independent technical review
- External assessment of an empirical or ML project’s design, data, code, and validity.
Track record (selected)
- Machine forecasting component for the SAGE team in IARPA’s Hybrid Forecasting Challenge, combining crowd and model forecasts.
- Democratic Spaces forecasting system for the V-Dem Institute, covering 165+ countries with annual updates.
- Monthly irregular-leadership-change forecasts for 165+ countries, used operationally by a US government client.
- Production ML pipeline for coding political events from news text, delivered to a US government client.
- Core contributor to the PLOVER event ontology and POLECAT dataset; maintainer of the
spduration,states, andicewsR packages, and contributor tomordecai3geoparsing. - Former US Army military intelligence officer (Iraq, 2009–10, counter-IED).
Contact
Andreas Beger