Cluster Analysis of Pakistani Terrorism Events to Support Counterterrorism

Abstract

The frequency of terrorist events in Pakistan has increased considerably in the past several years. These events are frequent and not random, making it important to identify useful patterns in their occurrences to assist counterterrorism organizations. In this paper, we conducted such an analytical activity for the first time in Pakistan. We acquired data of terrorist events from reliable online sources and applied data preprocessing techniques followed by cluster analysis. Based on statistical correlation, we discovered clusters over the following combinations: (1) "Event of Terrorism-Target of Terrorism"; and (2) "Event of Terrorism-Method of Terrorism". A more significant clustering is one which groups distinct combinations into separate clusters. We analyzed these clusters along three dimensions: (1) Annually for the time period 1988-2012; (2) for each Pakistani province; and (3) for different types of terrorist events. We also proposed a statistic for gauging the intensity of terrorism and analyzed it along the same three dimensions. Our results were extensive, but generally indicated significant Event-Target and Event-Method clusters, as well as increasing and decreasing trends in terrorism intensity. These can assist counterterrorism authorities in thwarting future attacks and arresting the responsible criminals.

Open source intelligence extraction for terrorism‐related information: A review

“…(Lutton & Fekete, 2011). Mahmood et al presented cluster analysis of Pakistani terroristic events using data from SATP (T. Mahmood et al, 2018). The authors discovered meaningful insights to counter-terrorism by deriving statistical correlations between the pairs-Event of Terrorism-Target of Terrorism and Event of Terrorism-Method of Terrorism.…”

Prediction of Extremist Behaviour and Suicide Bombing from Terrorism Contents Using Supervised Learning

“…Moreover, the GBN could list all the possibilities according to the probabilities and showed 94.7% of the results [5]. In another study, Mehmood et al [2] acquired data concerning terrorism in Pakistan between 1998 and 2012 from the SATP. The methodology included a cluster analysis based on statistical correlation, followed by data pre-processing.…”

“…This KD is ultimately used to provide practical decision-making support to law enforcement agencies. Nevertheless, the analytical processing of large amounts of data is complicated for humans [2]. Therefore, scholars have proposed numerous techniques to automate a significant part of or the entire analytical process.…”

“…Between 2001 and 2010, the country's anti-terrorist activities incurred a total of $68 billion. Moreover, in 2009, 300,000 IDPs were recorded in the wake of different forms of terrorist acts, including target killings, military operations, planted bombs and suicide attacks [2]. Suicide bombing is a terrorist practice targeting military personnel, famous personalities, religious sites and civilians.…”