Beger, Morgan, and Ward (BM&W) call into question the results of our article on forecasting civil wars. They claim that our theoretically-informed model of conflict escalation under-performs more mechanical, inductive alternatives. This claim is false. BM&W’s critiques are misguided or inconsequential, and their conclusions hinge on a minor technical question regarding receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves: should the curves be smoothed, or should empirical curves be used? BM&W assert that empirical curves should be used and all of their conclusions depend on this subjective modeling choice. We extend our original analysis to show that our theoretically-informed model performs as well as or better than more atheoretical alternatives across a range of performance metrics and robustness specifications. As in our original article, we conclude by encouraging conflict forecasters to treat the value added of theory not as an assumption, but rather as a hypothesis to test.

Beger、Morgan 和 Ward (BM&W) 质疑我们关于预测内战的文章的结果。他们声称我们的理论知识丰富的冲突升级模型表现不佳，更机械，归纳的替代方案。这种说法是错误的。BM&W 的批评是误导或无关紧要的，他们的结论取决于关于接收者操作特征 (ROC) 曲线的一个次要技术问题：曲线应该平滑，还是应该使用经验曲线？BM&W 声称应该使用经验曲线，并且他们的所有结论都取决于这种主观建模选择。我们扩展了我们的原始分析，以表明我们的理论模型在一系列性能指标和稳健性规范中的表现与更多非理论替代方案一样好或更好。正如在我们的原始文章中，