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+# trade-communities
+Predicting international trade communities from world development indicators
+
+## The problem
+
+This project aimed to determine the predictive power of world
+development indicators for international trade communities, while inspecting changes and trends in
+these communities over time. It was hypothesized that world development indicators may contain the
+right balance of both sociologically and economically-driven information to predict international trade
+communities.
+
+In order to test this hypothesis, a weighted, directed network was created using export FOB data
+from the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Direction of Trade (DOT) statistics. Communities were
+found in this network using the modularity maximization algorithm explained in [1]. These community
+classifications were then predicted from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators using a
+random forest classifier. 
+
+## References
+
+1. Leicht EA, Newman ME. “Community structure in directed networks”. Phys Rev Lett. 2008
+Mar 21; 100(11):118703. Epub 2008 Mar 21.