IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0179057.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Understanding the dynamics of terrorism events with multiple-discipline datasets and machine learning approach

Author

Listed:
  • Fangyu Ding
  • Quansheng Ge
  • Dong Jiang
  • Jingying Fu
  • Mengmeng Hao

Abstract

Terror events can cause profound consequences for the whole society. Finding out the regularity of terrorist attacks has important meaning for the global counter-terrorism strategy. In the present study, we demonstrate a novel method using relatively popular and robust machine learning methods to simulate the risk of terrorist attacks at a global scale based on multiple resources, long time series and globally distributed datasets. Historical data from 1970 to 2015 was adopted to train and evaluate machine learning models. The model performed fairly well in predicting the places where terror events might occur in 2015, with a success rate of 96.6%. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the model with optimized tuning parameter values successfully predicted 2,037 terrorism event locations where a terrorist attack had never happened before.

Suggested Citation

  • Fangyu Ding & Quansheng Ge & Dong Jiang & Jingying Fu & Mengmeng Hao, 2017. "Understanding the dynamics of terrorism events with multiple-discipline datasets and machine learning approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(6), pages 1-11, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0179057
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0179057
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179057
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179057&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0179057?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tamara Makarenko, 2004. "The Crime-Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay between Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism," Global Crime, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(1), pages 129-145, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peri, Giovanni & Rees, Daniel I. & Smith, Brock, 2023. "Terrorism and political attitudes: Evidence from European social surveys," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    2. Raj Bridgelall, 2022. "Applying unsupervised machine learning to counterterrorism," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 5(2), pages 1099-1128, November.
    3. Dong, Bing & Liu, Yapan & Fontenot, Hannah & Ouf, Mohamed & Osman, Mohamed & Chong, Adrian & Qin, Shuxu & Salim, Flora & Xue, Hao & Yan, Da & Jin, Yuan & Han, Mengjie & Zhang, Xingxing & Azar, Elie & , 2021. "Occupant behavior modeling methods for resilient building design, operation and policy at urban scale: A review," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 293(C).
    4. Peri, Giovanni & Rees, Daniel I. & Smith, Brock, 2020. "Terrorism, Political Opinions, and Election Outcomes: Evidence from Europe," IZA Discussion Papers 13090, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Zeng Li & Jingying Fu & Dong Jiang & Gang Lin & Donglin Dong & Xiaoxi Yan, 2017. "Spatiotemporal Distribution of U5MR and Their Relationship with Geographic and Socioeconomic Factors in China," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-12, November.
    6. Qian Wang & Mengmeng Hao & David Helman & Fangyu Ding & Dong Jiang & Xiaolan Xie & Shuai Chen & Tian Ma, 2023. "Quantifying the influence of climate variability on armed conflict in Africa, 2000–2015," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 25(9), pages 9289-9306, September.
    7. Mengmeng Hao & Fangyu Ding & Xiaolan Xie & Jingying Fu & Yushu Qian & Tobias Ide & Jean-François Maystadt & Shuai Chen & Quansheng Ge & Dong Jiang, 2022. "Varying climatic-social-geographical patterns shape the conflict risk at regional and global scales," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-8, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kjell Hausken & Dipak K. Gupta, 2016. "Determining the ideological orientation of terrorist organisations: the effects of government repression and organised crime," International Journal of Public Policy, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 12(1/2), pages 71-97.
    2. James Piazza, 2011. "The illicit drug trade, counternarcotics strategies and terrorism," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 149(3), pages 297-314, December.
    3. Schultz, Alison, 2022. "Guns and Kidneys: How Transplant Tourism Finances Global Conflict," VfS Annual Conference 2022 (Basel): Big Data in Economics 264020, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    4. Victor Asal & Brian J. Phillips, 2018. "What explains ethnic organizational violence? Evidence from Eastern Europe and Russia," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 35(2), pages 111-131, March.
    5. Trăistaru Marius, 2020. "Involving cross-border organized crime networks from ex-Soviet sources in support of terrorism and their influence on regional economic development," Proceedings of the International Conference on Business Excellence, Sciendo, vol. 14(1), pages 975-983, July.
    6. Marius Traistaru, 2021. "Impact of Actions of ex-Soviet Cross-Border Organized Crime Groups on Regional Economic Development," Ovidius University Annals, Economic Sciences Series, Ovidius University of Constantza, Faculty of Economic Sciences, vol. 0(1), pages 179-186, August.
    7. Nazli Avdan & Mariya Omelicheva, 2021. "Human Trafficking-Terrorism Nexus: When Violent Non-State Actors Engage in the Modern-Day Slavery," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 65(9), pages 1576-1606, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0179057. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.