Modeling terrorist organization attack patterns

Abstract

Although terrorism has been investigated by researchers for decades, not much research has gone into studying specific attack patterns. This type of research into repetitious behavior has been done in criminology, but has not yet been done for terrorism. Using the Global Terrorism Database, I analyze the frequency of specific types of targets, weapon choices, and other elements of terrorist attacks to look for trends within each organization. I find that while some patterns emerge, patterns that are truly unique to a specific organization do not emerge. More research is required to determine if this holds as more variables are added to the model.