This publication authored by Dr. Dipyaman Sanyal and myself looks at the different global factors that affects terrorism. The data source is the RAND database which takes into every action of terrorism right from the year 1972. The publication also looks at countries which are "terrorism-proof", the different mechanisms of a terror attack and finally tries to find any measurable correlation between religion and terrorism.

1. Global Factors affecting
Terrorism through Data Analytics
Terrorism and the World
Dr. Dipyaman Sanyal
Rupayan Banerjee

2. Objectives
• Heat Map of Terrorism
• How region-specific is Terrorism
• How has Terrorism affected through the years
• Weapon and Attack type Analysis
• Analyzing the Success of a Terror Attack
• Regressing Terrorism
• Islamic Terrorism: A Myth or Reality
• Shortcomings of this project

3. A Brief Outlook of the most Affected Nations
The radius of the
circle corresponds
to the number of
affected human
beings
Affected
Number of human
beings Killed
Number of human
beings Wounded

4. In an expansive world map the HEAT MAP would look like
As the color intensifies
it signifies the total
number of affected
humans

5. But does the number of affected people really
describe the terrorism index of the nation
Let us suppose this is
the population of India
And this is the
population
of Pakistan
No. of affected
persons
in India
No. of affected
persons
in Pakistan
Looking at the Concentric
circles we can intuitively say
that a person living in
Pakistan is more prone to
be a victim of Terrorism than
his counterpart in India.
So we introduce the concept of per capita terrorism. After
getting the numbers we assume the terrorism index of USA
to be 1 and then calculate the index of other countries. If we
draw a packed bubble on that we would get the next figure.
This Circle represents the
Per capita terrorism of USA

6. Now if we draw the HEAT MAP it would look like

7. So if someone wants to be terrorism-proof which
country should he choose?

8. Is Terrorism Region Specific?
The major areas of the world can be divided into 12 parts.
Our general knowledge will say YES it is. But is that answer
statistically significant?
North America
Central America &
the Caribbean
South America
East Asia
Australasia and Oceania
Southeast Asia
South Asia
Western Europe
Eastern Europe
Middle East
Sub Saharan
Africa
Russia and the Newly
Independent States
NULL Hypothesis: Terrorism is uniformly spread across all these regions.

9. Spread of Terrorism Deaths across the World
region region_txt
1North America
2Central America & Caribbean
3South America
4East Asia
5Southeast Asia
6South Asia
7Western Europe
8Eastern Europe
9Middle East & North Africa
10Sub-Saharan Africa
11Russia & the Newly Independent States (NIS)
12Australasia & Oceania

10. Spread of Terrorism Deaths across the World
An F value of 50 signifies that some regions are STATISTICALLY more
prone towards terrorism than other. The excel sheet embedded
herein shown the Post Hoc analysis of the same.
We do not accept the null hypothesis that terrorism is uniformly
spread (i.e. the mean loss of death due to terrorism is equal).

11. Is Terrorism Time Specific?
Has it significantly increased with time or has it decreased?
Depends on the time frame taken
Year on Year Decade on Decade
NOT SIGNIFICANT SIGNIFICANT
NULL Hypothesis: Terrorism is uniformly
spread over history.

12. Year on Year Means Plot Decade on Decade Means Plot
F Value of 9 means the finding
is statistically SIGNIFICANT
F Value of 1.65 means the
finding is statistically NOT
SIGNIFICANT

13. Weapon and Attack Type Analysis
Armed Assault Assassination
Hostage TakingHijackingFacility Attack
Bombing
Kidnapping
Different Types of Attacks
Hypothesis 1: Has the Attack Type changed in the decades from 1970 to the present era?
Hypothesis 2: How effective are the different attack types?

14. Weapon and Attack Type Analysis
NULL Hypothesis: The different attack types are independent of the decades (i.e. wrt time)
We therefore do not accept the null hypothesis.
Attack Type and Time are not independent of
each other.
IMPORTANT
INSIGHTS
1. The Assassinations have reduced by a ratio of
4:1 which we can attribute to enhanced personal
security as Assassination are done on important
political figures.
2. Bombing and explosion have increased twofold from
1990s to 2000s underlying the fact that the terrorists
are using mass destruction to achieve its objective
A Glance of the spread of Attacks over Time

15. Weapon and Attack Type Analysis
Deciding the effectiveness of the attack types. For that we have
divided the killing of each incident into the following slabs.
<10
>10
and
<50
>50 and
<100 >200
>100
and
<150
NULL Hypothesis: Attack Type and number killed are independent of each other.
We therefore do not accept the null hypothesis.
Attack Type and Number of people killed
are not independent of each other.
We find that armed assault have been responsible
for close to half of the deaths caused by terrorism

16. Analyzing the Success of a Terror Attack
Hypothesis 1: Is success dependent on the Attack Type?
Hypothesis 2: Has the success changed with respect to time (decades) ?
Hypothesis 3: Is success dependent on the region?
NULL Hypothesis: There is no dependency between Attack Type and Success
INSIGHTS
The attack type most prone to
have success is Armed Assault.
Assassinations are most prone to
get caught. In fact almost half of
all foiled terror incidents are
Assassinations closely followed
by Explosions.
We do not accept the NULL hypothesis which
implies that the success is dependent on the
Attack Type.

17. Analyzing the Success of a Terror Attack
NULL Hypothesis: There is no dependency between Decade and Success
We do not accept the NULL hypothesis which
implies that the success is dependent on the
Decade.
INSIGHTS
Looking at the ratios we
understand that during the
1970s the incidents were
prone to be unsuccessful. In
the later 2 decades that ratio
of success increased. After
that it decreased and if we
extrapolate the result for 2010
decade we would understand
that this trend has now been
reversed

18. Analyzing the Success of a Terror Attack
NULL Hypothesis: There is no dependency between Region and Success
INSIGHTS
A very interesting pattern is observed. If the
ratio of the percentages were observed it
would be found that developed parts of
continents like North America, East Asia and
Western Europe have almost thrice the
capacity for foiling a terrorist incident
compared to its counterparts in North Africa
or South Asia. In fact Sub Saharan Africa is
actually the worst when it comes to security.
REGION_TXT VS. SUCCESS

19. Regressing Terrorism
The objective of regressing
Identifying the various factors
Factor Analysis
Testing the Assumptions
The baseline regression and its implications
The objective of regression in our project is to establish a cause – effect
relationship between terrorism and the factors causing them
From the various databases like World Bank and UNHD we identified
30 demographic variables of each country
We do Factor Analysis to club the aforementioned factors and then
club them under broad headings
Since we are doing OLS regression we test the 4 assumptions of
Normality, Linearity and Homoscedasticity. In case of any violations
we apply transformations.
We check the R2 and Adjusted R2 along with any sign of autocorrelation
or multicollinearity. Finally we try to understand what the Regression Equation
implies
Identifying the various factors
Factor Analysis
Testing the Assumptions
The baseline regression and its implications

20. Factor Analysis
Life Satisfaction
Freedom of
Choice
Job Satisfaction
Community
Satisfaction
Human Dev Index
Gender Inequality
Net Migration
Foreign Income
Inequalities
GDP per capita
Net Income
PPP
Economy
Computer Users
Mobile Subscribers
Internet
Lifestyle
Trust in Govt
Safety
Trust
Employment
Trust
Religious
diversity
Religious Diversity
Index
Unimportant factors are
now removed.

21. Dependent and Independent Variables
TerroristIncidents
Religious Diversity Index
Trust
Lifestyle
Inequalities
Human Development Index
Economy
•The dependent variables is the Terrorist Incident while the others are independent variables.
•Since the variables have different scales so the z values of the same were considered.
•The broad grouping was done by using the composite scores.
•The first 73 countries with the highest number of terror incidents were taken as sample.

22. Testing Assumptions : Normality
For few of the variables we found that the data was not normal. In these cases
we used Log transformation which yielded normal distribution. Normality was tested
using the formula Skewness/Std.Error < 3 and by visual test.
LOG TRANSFORMATION

23. Testing Assumptions : Linearity
The partial regression plot was drawn for each independent variable and the Linear
R2 and Quadratic R2 were noticed. Since a difference of .02 was not there we assumed
the linearity of the independent variables.

24. Testing Assumptions : Homoscedasticity
Since no pattern was observed we
concluded that the data is not homoscedastic.
Testing Outliers by Mahalanobis Distance
Before removing outliers
After removing outliers
Thus the 5 outliers were removed
resulting in a final sample of 68 countries

25. Baseline Regression Model and its implication
44% of the variance is explained. In case
of terrorism which is a fairly exploratory
research this can be considered a good percentage.
A Durbin-Watson of 1.5 to 2.5
can be considered safe for
ignoring Autocorrelation.
AVIFoflessthan10is
consideredsafefor
Ignoringmulticollinearity.
This is because for a country having all the
independent variables 0 it means the country
doesn’t exist.
Incidents = 1.138*Economy – 1.329*Lifestyle - .542*Trust

26. Islamic Terror: Myth or Reality
11%
89%
Terror Incidents
Islamic Terror Non Islamic Terror
The Terror Incidents which were aided or
abetted by a Muslim group are being termed as
Islamic Terror. It is seen that only 1 in 10
incidents are caused by Islamic groups.
Determining whether the average people killed due to Islamic
Terrorism is different from other groups.

27. Things that could have been done better
Due to paucity of time we were unable to implement a few of our ideas. Mentioned below
are some of them.
•Identifying other factors in terrorism.
•The success of an incident also depends on other factors.
•Determining other facets of Islamic Terrorism.
•Study on US to understand whether their paranoia on Islamic Terrorism is justified by data
•Study on Indian Terrorism
•Whether data supports the concept of Saffron Terrorism
•Studying the different facets of Suicide Terrorism
•Studying the behavioral patterns of the top 30 terrorist organizations in the world

28. THANK YOU