Predictive Tasks

After considering the descriptive analysis, the group decided that the most promising predictive analysis that should be considered are:

• Predict the terrorist group based on the attack characteristics.

  This is a very useful predictive task because when a terrorist attack occurs sometimes there is no group claiming this attack (e. g. a high number of terrorist attacks has no author). Besides, it can also happen that terrorist groups falsely claim an attack, and in this case, we can check on the probability of this to be true.

• Predict the number of victims of an attack,

  based on the type of attack, the target of the attack, and weapons used. This can be useful for the civil protection to better allocate resources when a terrorist attack occurs.

• Predict the cities where terrorist attacks can occur.

  In this case, the group needs to join the current dataset with another one with demographic data. Based on demographic characteristics of previous attacks it is possible to predict new ones. This task is also useful in order for governments to take preventive measures.