SCARE: The Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine

In this paper we introduce SCARE the Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine which implements an algorithm that solves spatial abduction problems (Shakarian, Subrahmanian, and Sapino 2009). We review results of SCARE for activities by Iranian-sponsored “Special Groups” (Kagan, Kagan, and Pletka 2008) operating throughout the Baghdad urban area and compare these findings with experiments where we predict IED cache sites of the Special Groups in Sadr City. We find that by localizing the spatial abduction problem to a smaller area we obtain greater accuracy predicting cache sites within 0.33 km as opposed to 0.72 km for all of Baghdad. We suspect that local factors of physical and cultural geography impact reasoning with spatial abduction for this problem.