Discovering Hierarchical Structure in Terrorist Networks

Abstract

The network structure of a group determines its strengths and weaknesses. A general knowledge of the prevalent models of terrorist organizations and its analysis methods leads to a better understanding of their capabilities. One important method is centrality analysis, which determines the relative importance of vertices (terrorists) in a network based on their connectivity within the network structure. In this paper, we address the hierarchy property sharing among a large amount of networks. Based upon the degree centrality (DC) and eigenvector centrality (EC) measure, a method is proposed to discover the hierarchical structure of a terrorist network. This hierarchical structure sheds light on the leadership and the likely sub groups embedded in the network