Suicide bomb attack identification and analytics through data mining techniques

Abstract

Suicide bomb attacks are a high priority concern nowadays for every country in the world. They are a massively destructive criminal activity known as terrorism where one explodes a bomb attached to himself or herself, usually in a public place, taking the lives of many. Terrorist activity in different regions of the world depends and varies according to geopolitical situations and significant regional factors. There has been no significant work performed previously by utilizing the Pakistani suicide attack dataset and no data mining-based solutions have been given related to suicide attacks. This paper aims to contribute to the counterterrorism initiative for the safety of this world against suicide bomb attacks by extracting hidden patterns from suicidal bombing attack data. In order to analyze the psychology of suicide bombers and find a correlation between suicide attacks and the prediction of the next possible venue for terrorist activities, visualization analysis is performed and data mining techniques of classification, clustering and association rule mining are incorporated. For classification, Naïve Bayes, ID3 and J48 algorithms are applied on distinctive selected attributes. The results exhibited by classification show high accuracy against all three algorithms applied, i.e., 73.2%, 73.8% and 75.4%. We adapt the K-means algorithm to perform clustering and, consequently, the risk of blast intensity is identified in a particular location. Frequent patterns are also obtained through the Apriori algorithm for the association rule to extract the factors involved in suicide attacks.