A Bayesian decision support system for counteracting activities of terrorist groups

Abstract We present an integrating decision support system designed to aid security analysts’ monitoring of terrorist groups. The system comprises of (i) a dynamic network model of the level of bilateral communications between individuals and (ii) dynamic graphical models of those individual’s latent threat states. These component models are combined in a statistically coherent manner to provide measures of the imminence of an attack by the terrorist group. Domain knowledge provides the structures of the models, values of parameters and prior distributions over latent variables. Inference of the values is performed using time-series of observed data and the statistical dependencies assumed between said data and model variables. The work draws on social network and graphical models used in sociological, military, and medical fields.