Terrorism analytics: Learning to predict the perpetrator

Data about terrorist attacks in India was analysed. Several machine learning algorithms were trained on the Indian subset of the Global Terrorism Database to learn to predict the perpetrator of a terrorist attack, given data about the types of attack, target and weapon in addition to the location, year and other attributes of the event. It was found that Support Vector Machine technique gave accuracy higher than 75% in predicting the perpetrators. This approach has the potential to aid investigating agencies and carries significant implications for national and international security.