Title: Measuring Territorial Control in Civil Wars Using Hidden Markov Models: A Data Informatics-Based Approach,
Abstract: Territorial control is a key aspect shaping the dynamics of civil war.
Despite its importance, we lack data on territorial control that are
fine-grained enough to account for subnational spatio-temporal variation and
that cover a large set of conflicts. To resolve this issue, we propose a
theoretical model of the relationship between territorial control and tactical
choice in civil war and outline how Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are suitable to
capture theoretical intuitions and estimate levels of territorial control. We
discuss challenges of using HMMs in this application and mitigation strategies
for future work.