Homeland Security Data Mining and Link Analysis

Data mining is the process of posing queries to large quantities of data and extracting information often previously unknown using mathematical, statistical, and machine-learning techniques. Data mining has many applications in a number of areas, including marketing and sales, medicine, law, manufacturing, and, more recently, homeland security. Using data mining, one can uncover hidden dependencies between terrorist groups as well as possibly predict terrorist events based on past experience. One particular data-mining technique that is being investigated a great deal for homeland security is link analysis, where links are drawn between various nodes, possibly detecting some hidden links. This article provides an overview of the various developments in data-mining applications in homeland security. The organization of this article is as follows. First, we provide some background on data mining and the various threats. Then, we discuss the applications of data mining and link analysis for homeland security. Privacy considerations are discussed next as part of future trends. The article is then concluded.