Bayesian Geographical Profiling in Terrorism Revealing

Abstract

A significant part of research in terrorism studies focuses on the analysis of terrorist groups. An important issue for this type of research is that a large number of attacks are not attributed to a specific group. As an appropriate approach to solve the problem of attributing group responsibility we applied the geographic profiling theory. We analyzed several terrorist organizations which typically commit attacks far away from their headquarters. We proposed an innovative method based on Bayesian approach to find the organization’s base and to attribute responsibility to perpetrators of terrorist attacks. We compared the results with classical techniques used in criminology. The real data analysis shows rationale for the proposed approach. Analyzed data comes from the Global Terrorism Database which is currently the most extensive database on terrorism ever collected.

Keywords

• Bayesian data analysis
• geographic profiling
• Global Terrorism Database
• anchor point