Novel Application in Machine Learning: Predicting the Issuance of COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Orders in Africa

In the work, we investigate which factors are most important for the issuance of SAHO among n=54 African countries between January 31st and June 15th, 2020. We employ a novel dataset of 260 different variables capturing country-level information on economic, political, social, external, and health-related factors for each country in our dataset. To identify the most significant factors, we treat the question of which countries issue SAHO as a classification problem (issued orders vs. did not issue orders) and utilize a random forest classifier, a method of machine learning, to identify the variables that best explain whether a country issued a SAHO order or not.