Terrorism Alert Patterns

Correlated Patterns

High Correlation Threshold

0.95

17-Aug-08

Published 18-Aug-08

How Close Are We to a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack?

One way to answer this question is to look for similarities between the Terrorism Alert Pattern (TAP) for the last 30, 60, or 90 days and the TAPs that culminated with major violence (terrorist or military), such as 9/11, the Israeli incursions into Palestinian territories, the bombing in Bali, the bombing of the HSBC bank headquarters in Istanbul, etc. The Terrorism Search Engine in the MI2 System identifies and ranks all TAPs that are correlated with the TAP for any time period for which there is empirical data.

The correlation coefficient for perfectly correlated TAPs is 1; the correlation coefficient for uncorrelated TAPs is 0. Two TAPs can be considered to be highly correlated if their correlation coefficient is higher than 0.95, and highly uncorrelated if their corelation coefficient is in the range from -0.05 to 0.05.

The CURRENT 90-DAY TAP is the TAP for the time period from 20-May-08 through 17-Aug-08.

The PRE-9/11 90-DAY TAP that is 'best' correlated with the CURRENT TAP is the TAP for the time period from 1-Jun-01 through 29-Aug-01. 9/11 occured 13 days after 29-Aug-01. The correlation's 95% confidence interval ranges from -0.118 to 0.293 .

The CURRENT 90-DAY TAP is 'best' correlated with the TAP for the 90-day time period from 16-Oct-03 through 13-Jan-04. The correlation's 95% confidence interval ranges from 0.779 to 0.898 .

The 90-DAY TAP that is 'best' correlated with the 9/11 TAP is the TAP for the time period from 22-Dec-06 through 21-Mar-07. 9/11 occured 13 days after 21-Mar-07. The correlation's 95% confidence interval ranges from 0.617 to 0.814 .

A5-18-Aug-08

M-708