valofils/madagascar-food-security

IPC phase classification for Madagascar using FEWS NET & HDX # Madagascar Food Security Early Warning System > Predicting acute food insecurity phases for Madagascar livelihood zones using > FEWS NET IPC data and XGBoost — deployed as a serverless AWS Lambda function > behind API Gateway, with a FastAPI local service and Docker support. --- ## Overview This project builds an end-to-end machine learning pipeline that ingests IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) data from the FEWS NET API, engineers temporal lag and cold-start interaction features, trains binary and multiclass XGBoost classifiers with walk-forward cross-validation, and serves predictions via both a local FastAPI service and a serverless AWS Lambda function. The system outputs a crisis probability and binary label for any Madagascar livelihood zone based on its historical food security trajectory. **Domain context**: Madagascar experiences chronic food insecurity, particularly in the Grand Sud (Androy, Atsimo Andrefana) and Grand Sud-Est (Befotaka, Farafangana, Ikongo) regions. The lean season runs October–March. This system is designed to support humanitarian early warning, not replace IPC technical working group processes. --- ## Results ### Walk-forward cross-validation (2019–2023) | Fold | n Crisis | ROC-AUC | Precision | Recall | F1 | |------|----------|---------|-----------|--------|----| | 2019 | 11 | 0.990 | 0.556 | 0.909 | 0.690 | | 2020 | 23 | 0.975 | 0.759 | 0.957 | 0.846 | | 2021 | 63 | 0.977 | 0.920 | 0.730 | 0.814 | | 2022 | 79 | 0.987 | 0.716 | 0.987 | 0.830 | | 2023 | 4 | 0.978 | 0.125 | 1.000 | 0.222 | | **Mean** | — | **0.981** | **0.615** | **0.917** | **0.680** | ### Held-out test set (2024–2026) | Model | ROC-AUC | Crisis Recall | Crisis F1 | |-------|---------|---------------|-----------| | Binary (Crisis vs Not) | 0.801 | 0.00 | 0.00 | | Multiclass (P1 / P2 / P3+) | — | 0.00 | 0.00 | **The model fails on the 2024–2026 test period due to distributional shift** — Crisis events in 2024/2026 arrive from lower …