Learning future terrorist targets through temporal meta-graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach using temporal meta-graphs and deep learning to predict future terrorist targets based on attack data, improving understanding of terrorist behavior and enhancing forecasting accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a new method of using temporal meta-graphs for feature engineering and demonstrates the effectiveness of bi-directional LSTM networks in terrorist target prediction.

Findings

Temporal meta-graphs provide richer insights than simple frequency-based time-series.

Bi-directional LSTM models outperform other algorithms in forecasting terrorist targets.

The approach enhances understanding of terrorist operational dependencies.

Abstract

In the last 20 years, terrorism has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and massive economic, political, and humanitarian crises in several regions of the world. Using real-world data on attacks occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to 2018, we propose the use of temporal meta-graphs and deep learning to forecast future terrorist targets. Focusing on three event dimensions, i.e., employed weapons, deployed tactics and chosen targets, meta-graphs map the connections among temporally close attacks, capturing their operational similarities and dependencies. From these temporal meta-graphs, we derive 2-day-based time series that measure the centrality of each feature within each dimension over time. Formulating the problem in the context of the strategic behavior of terrorist actors, these multivariate temporal sequences are then utilized to learn what target types are at the highest risk of being chosen. The paper makes two contributions. First, it demonstrates that engineering the feature space via temporal meta-graphs produces richer knowledge than shallow time-series that only rely on frequency of feature occurrences. Second, the performed experiments reveal that bi-directional LSTM networks achieve superior forecasting performance compared to other algorithms, calling for future research aiming at fully discovering the potential of artificial intelligence to counter terrorist violence.