How QGI works
QGI reads open data against history. We learn the signal shapes that tend to run ahead of the events that matter, then, across 180+ countries and territories, we measure how closely each country is tracing those shapes right now, and show you the real historical cases it most resembles. Evidence you can open, not a verdict.
The data lake, by the numbers
Updated Apr 29, 2026From a pattern to a trend
Start with a real one. QGI’s pattern detector found that Portugal and Spain moved almost in lockstep across 26 indicators (a Pearson correlation near 0.87) for the half-century after both shed authoritarian rule in the mid-1970s. Each indicator that co-moves between two countries is a single co-movement we call an SCDI; the bundle of them is a pattern.
One pattern is not yet a trend. QGI gathers many patterns whose countries went on to share the same kind of event, lines them up against the verified record, and distils the movement they had in common. That distilled, canonical shape is a trend: the fingerprint that tends to run ahead of, say, a democratic transition, a currency crisis, or a coup. The two methods below are the two ways QGI does this at scale.
Five terms used on this page
- Event
- A historical incident QGI tracks against a country's indicator trajectory: for example, Brazil's 2018 presidential election, the 2008 Icelandic banking collapse, the 2011 Bahraini uprising. Every event is verified against a public source.
- Indicator
- A single time-series QGI ingests: GDP per capita, V-Dem polyarchy score, Gini coefficient, FAOSTAT food-price index. Currently 109 indicators across 3 sources.
- SCDI
- Single Correlating Dyadic Index. The atomic unit of co-movement: when country A's trajectory on one indicator matches country B's, year-aligned at offset N, with Pearson correlation ≥ 0.5. Billions of these get computed per pipeline run.
- Pattern
- A repeated co-movement across multiple indicators, when several SCDIs link the same country pair at the same time offset. Patterns are stronger evidence than any single SCDI.
- Trend
- The canonical shape distilled from multiple Patterns. A trend says: this country's current trajectory resembles the trajectory of a country that went on to experience a given kind of event. Trends are the basis for every country reading on the live site.
Two ways we get the insights
Everything QGI does rests on one idea: history rhymes, and the rhyme shows up in the data before the headline. Two methods turn that idea into a reading you can act on.
The Cascade method
Builds risk shapes from the ground up. Starting from 109 public indicators and decades of curated history, it finds the signal relationships that recur across countries, then the country pairs whose whole trajectories rhyme. Fold those relationships together with verified, fact-checked events and you distil a trend: the shape a country’s signals tend to trace in the years before a given kind of event.
The Trajectory Engine
Puts those trends to work. Each quarter it takes a trend’s shape and a country’s most recent signals and measures how closely the country is tracing that shape now. The result is a resemblance reading, not a forecast: a structured way to say what today rhymes with, alongside the real cases it most echoes.
Inside the Trajectory Engine
For readers who want the machinery, here is what the Trajectory Engine actually does per trend. Nothing below is a black box; it is a deliberately conservative pipeline built to avoid fooling itself.
Per-trend model
Each event type gets its own supervised model trained on the countries that did and did not experience it. With a healthy positive base we use gradient-boosted trees (XGBoost); where positives are scarce we fall back to regularised logistic regression, so a thin trend cannot pretend to a complexity its data will not support.
Greedy indicator selection
Indicators are chosen by a forward walk: start from none, repeatedly add the single indicator that most improves cross-validated separation, and stop when the gains plateau. The walk also picks the window length, in years, over which the trajectory is read. A typical trend ends up resting on a handful of indicators, not all 109.
Resemblance scoring
A country’s recent trajectory on the selected indicators is standardised (z-scored against its own history) and compared to the trend’s canonical shape by cosine similarity, weighted by each indicator’s contribution (SHAP). The closer the match, the higher the resemblance score.
Validation, honestly
Every trend is scored by leave-one-country-out cross-validation, so it is judged on countries it never trained on, with 95% confidence intervals from 2,000 bootstrap resamples. We also check calibration, run-to-run reliability, temporal confounding, and fold stability. Trends that clear the bar are marked Validated; those that only discriminate are Directional; those that fail are shown as Experimental, never dressed up as more.
We use leave-one-country-out rather than random splits on purpose: random test sets leak regional structure and flatter the model. A trend has to generalise to a country it has never seen, or it does not earn a Validated mark.
What we read
Two catalogues sit underneath every reading: the indicators we track, and the events we hold them against. Both are public, both are organised so you can see exactly what goes in.
Indicators
109 open-data indicators from the World Bank, V-Dem and FAOSTAT, spanning the economy, governance, rights, conflict and society.
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Events
Every reading is held against real, verified events, organised into a three-layer taxonomy from broad master groups down to specific event types.
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How an event earns its place
A trend is only as trustworthy as the events behind it. Here is how every event earns its place before it can shape a single reading.
Three independent stages between finding an event on the web and adding it to the record. The same event, the 2008 Icelandic banking collapse, is shown at every stage.
An event is only kept once it has passed verification with a true verdict and a cited public source. Events that fail, or that no source can confirm, are dropped.
A worked example
Take the currency crisis trend. From the indicators that moved together in the run-up to past currency crises, reserves drawing down, short-term debt climbing, confidence in the currency slipping, the Cascade method distils the shape those crises shared beforehand.
Each quarter the Trajectory Engine asks: which of today’s 180+ countries are tracing that same shape? It ranks every country by resemblance and, for the closest ones, shows the historical cases they most echo, each with the real event that followed and a public source.
You see the working at every step: the signals moving, the canonical shape they are measured against, and the precedents behind the reading.
How confident we are
Not every kind of event leaves the same fingerprint in the data. Some trends stand out sharply from everything else; others are fainter. Every trend carries a confidence mark for how clearly its shape separates from the noise, and that mark travels with it, onto every trend and every country reading.
We lead with the cases we are most confident about and keep the fainter ones honestly labelled. You will never see a number presented as more certain than it is.
The news layer
Trends are structural: shapes learned from decades of indicator history. The news layer adds a second, faster reading from the open global news record. For the trends that carry enough news to read on their own, we show a per-trend News Pulse: a news pressurescore from 0 to 100 for how prominent that trend is in a country's news this month, counted as elevated from 60 upward. Six trends carry a live News Pulse today; the remaining high-salience themes sit on a published coverage roadmap on the Risk Board. The score is ranked across every covered country and month, so a 70 reads high relative to how that trend has run everywhere, not just locally.
The two readings never merge into one number. Both run from 0 to 100, and a reading counts as elevated from 60 upward. They combine into a verdict for each country and trend:
- Both Firing. Structural resemblance and news pressure are both elevated. The combinations to open first.
- News-Only. The news is loud but the structure is not primed. Often noise; worth a glance, not an alarm.
- Elevated & Quiet. The structure is elevated while the news stays quiet: two readings on the same country that don't always move together.
- Quiet. Neither reading is elevated.
Each reading earns its standing against the verified event record, election by election, crisis by crisis. The electoral and economic readings are recall-validated: they light up consistently around known events of each type across the covered countries. That was established by aligning every verified election and economic crisis at month zero and measuring the news pressure in the surrounding months; the signal holds, and for elections strengthens, when recomputed using only information available at the time. Trends whose news pressure showed no consistent signal around events are not marked as validated, and some are shown news-only while their structural reading is still being validated. The layer reads 30 countries today and grows as the signal proves out.
The geopolitical risk layer
Alongside the trends and the news layer, QGI keeps its own geopolitical-risk reading for more than two hundred countries, built from the global news record. Across the forty-four countries that carry a published academic benchmark, it tracks the same rises and falls in risk, which makes it a wider-angle confirmation layer you can set beside the readings above.
How to read a score
- It is resemblance, not probability. A country near the top of a trend is tracing a shape that has run ahead of that kind of event before. It is not a prediction that the event will happen.
- Higher means look closer. Read a strong score as a reason to open the evidence, the signals, the canonical shape, the historical analogues, not as a verdict.
- Weaker matches are flagged. When a resemblance is thin or rests on a small base of cases, we say so on the reading itself.
- Every reading is datable. Scores are refreshed every quarter and stamped with their date, so you always know how current a reading is.