MOSCOW, May 6. /TASS/. Researchers at Russia’s Higher School of Economics (HSE) have developed the Gulf Tension Index, which aggregates open-source data on the conflict in the Persian Gulf with the goal of predicting its future course, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at the HSE Institute of Public Administration Marat Zembatov told TASS.

"The Gulf Tension Index shows the current state and forecasts of the conflict in the Persian Gulf. The methodology is based on eight groups of normalized quantitative indicators that are updated daily. The first two groups of indicators take into account current data on the military situation in the region and the current dispositions of the parties to the conflict. The remaining groups of indicators consider industrial, logistical, infrastructure, export, prices, and humanitarian data, as well as such an important element of conflict dynamics as the diplomatic component," Zembatov said.

Among more than 70 individual indicators used by the authors are quantitative data from open sources on damage to military and civilian infrastructure, data on fluctuations in prices for energy resources and certain types of critical raw materials (such as sulfur, urea, phosphate fertilizers, and others), as well as data characterizing the state of marine insurance, freight, and freedom of navigation in the Gulf, he noted.

One of the most important components of the Index is the probability coefficient P7, which characterizes the likelihood of a turning point in the course of events, the expert said. "We factor into the Index the probability of a new qualitative event over a seven-day horizon, which could be any new event capable of having a decisive impact on the course of the conflict in the Gulf. When P7 rises with moderate values of the Gulf Tension Index, we see that the market still underestimates the risks. Whereas when all components of the Index rise, we can say that the probability of a turning point is increasing and the conflict is entering a more dangerous phase," he explained.