Terrorist Threat Prediction in Urban Environments

Terrorist events, such as suicide bombings, are frightening, destructive, and rare. The nature of suicide bombings and improved explosive device (IED) attacks makes effective defensive measures difficult with the result that defensive actions typically impose greater restrictions on the larger population. Predicting the locations of terrorist events can enable more directed defensive efforts. While a number of predictive technologies might be used for this problem, very view are capable of dealing explicitly with the inherent decision making used by the terrorists in their attack planning. This paper describes an approach to terrorist incident prediction that uses discrete spatial choice models to predict the behavior of the terrorist. This work builds on our previous work using point process models and spatial choice analysis to forecasting criminal behavior. We give examples of the use of this approach and an evaluation of its performance with data from suicide bombings in Israel and IED attacks. Evaluations show the discrete spatial choice models are more effective at predicting future attack locations than previous methods using density estimates. 1 Problem Definition In recent years terrorist attacks have taken a variety of forms to include suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, hostage taking, mortar and