Quantifying the future lethality of terror organizations.

ABSTRACT: As terror groups proliferate and grow in sophistication, a major international concern is the development of scientific methods that explain and predict insurgent violence. Approaches to estimating a group's future lethality often require data on the group's capabilities and resources, but by the nature of the phenomenon, these data are intentionally concealed by the organizations themselves via encryption, the dark web, back-channel financing, and misinformation. Here, we present a statistical model for estimating a terror group's future lethality using latent-variable modeling techniques to infer a group's intrinsic capabilities and resources for inflicting harm. The analysis introduces 2 explanatory variables that are strong predictors of lethality and raise the overall explained varian

SUBMITTER: Yang Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6815138 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature