IFPRI AFRICA BROWN BAG SEMINAR SERIES: ‘’MODELLING FOOD SYSTEMS WITH NEURAL NETWORKS’’
IFPRI Africa cordially invites you to a Brown Bag Seminar on
‘’Modelling Food Systems with Neural Networks’’
Friday, July 1st, 2022
9:00 – 10:00 AM (EST) | 1:00-2:00 PM (GMT)
Presented by:
John Ulimwengu & Nathaniel Ferguson
Abstract:
Food systems encompass connected actors and activities who jointly produce food and nutrition security for all. Hence, modelling food system requires a framework that mimics not only the behavior of individual components of the system but also captures the interactions between them. In this paper, we use Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) as a predictive framework that capture nonlinear correlation between food systems inputs and its out main output, food security. ANN models have been used to predict components of food systems such as household expenditures and farmer behavior but never to model food system as a network. Here, using data from the United States of America, we show that ANN can predict county-level food insecurity given the flows of food between counties. We use the connection weight and randomization methods to calculate the importance and statistical significance of each food system input. Our results suggest that different components of the food system have different impacts on food security. Given existing nonlinearity and multi-level variable interactions in food systems, we believe that artificial neural networks have the potential to produce relevant evidence for policymaking.
Presenters:
John Ulimwengu is a Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI. His research foci include poverty dynamics, economic growth, and rural development. He is involved in research and policy advisory work on sector policy and strategy issues related to the implementation of the AU/NEPAD’s Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Program (CAADP).
Nathaniel Ferguson is an intern with the Africa Region at IFPRI, working remotely from Texas. During the internship, he has worked on projects involving food systems, econometrics, and machine learning. He has an M.Sc. in Food Security from the American University of Beirut, and a B.S. in Economics from the University of North Texas.
