less democratic state plays a determinant role for an occurrence of conflict (Oneal and Russett, 1999)]. *Dependency* **is measured as the sum of a country's import and export with its partner** 
divided by the Gross Domestic Product of the stronger country. It is a continuous variable that measures the level of economic interdependence (dyadic trade as a portion of a state's gross domestic product) of the less economically dependent state in the dyad. 

## Iii. Method A. Neural Networks

Neural network requires selecting the best architecture to give good classification results. The best combination of the number of hidden units, activation function, training algorithm and training cycles that can result in a network which is able to generalise the test data in the best possible way is searched for during the model selection process. This helps to avoid the risk of over/under training. A multi-layer perceptron (MLP) trained with the scaled conjugate gradient (SCG) method (Moller, 1993) neural network was used to classify the MID input data. Logistic and hyperbolic activation functions for the output and hidden layers respectively, M **= 10 number of hidden units** 
and 100 training cycles resulted in an optimal architecture. 

## B. Support Vector Machines

SVM employs a method of mapping the input into a feature space of higher dimensionality and then finds a linear separating hyperplane with maximum margin of separation. There are various mapping or kernel functions in use, the most common of which are linear, polynomial, radial basis function (RBF) and sigmoid. The choice of a kernel function depends on the type of problem at hand and the RBF: K x( x, ) **exp(** || x x || , 0 2 i j = −γ i − jγ > can handle non-linear data better than the 