Related papers: Estimating the historical and future probabilities…
The underlying reasons behind modern terrorism are seemingly complex and intangible. Despite diverse causal mechanisms, research has shown that there exists general statistical patterns at the global scale that can shed light on human…
We identify robust statistical patterns in the frequency and severity of violent attacks by terrorist organizations as they grow and age. Using group-level static and dynamic analyses of terrorist events worldwide from 1968-2008 and a…
Clauset and Woodard (2013) ask, "What is the likelihood of another September 11th-sized or larger terrorist event, worldwide, over the next decade?" This question has implications for numerous policy arenas - national security,…
I present a unified discussion of several recently published results concerning the escalation, timing and severity of violent events in human conflicts and global terrorism, and set them in the wider context of real-world and cyber-based…
This paper introduces new methods for studying the prevalence of terrorism around the world and over time. Our analysis treats spatial prevalence of terrorism, the changing profile of groups carrying out the acts of terrorism, and trends in…
We study the statistics of human deaths from wars, conflicts, similar man-made conflicts as well as natural disasters. The probability distribution of number of people killed in natural disasters as well as man made situations show power…
Traditional analyses of international terrorism have not sought to explain the emergence of rare but extremely severe events. Using the tools of extremal statistics to analyze the set of terrorist attacks worldwide between 1968 and 2004, as…
Capturing dynamics of operational similarity among terrorist groups is critical to provide actionable insights for counter-terrorism and intelligence monitoring. Yet, in spite of its theoretical and practical relevance, research addressing…
The size that an epidemic can reach, measured in terms of the number of fatalities, is an extremely relevant quantity. It has been recently claimed [Cirillo & Taleb, Nature Physics 2020] that the size distribution of major epidemics in…
In the spirit of Richardson's original (1948) study of the statistics of deadly conflicts, we study the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks worldwide since 1968. We show that these events are uniformly characterized by the…
Mass violence, almost no matter how defined, is (thankfully) rare. Rare events are very difficult to study in a systematic manner. Standard statistical procedures can fail badly and usefully accurate forecasts of rare events often are…
Human activities can play a crucial role in the statistical properties of observables in many complex systems such as social, technological and economic systems. We demonstrate this by looking into the heavy-tailed distributions of…
From biotechnology to cyber-risks, most extreme technological risks cannot be reliably estimated from historical statistics. Therefore, engineers resort to predictive methods, such as fault/event trees in the framework of probabilistic…
We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of historical data. We introduce a novel approach to apply extreme value theory to…
We investigate the predictability of extreme events in time series. The focus of this work is to understand under which circumstances large events are better predictable than smaller events. Therefore we use a simple prediction algorithm…
Terrorism is a major problem worldwide, causing thousands of fatalities and billions of dollars in damage every year. Toward the end of better understanding and mitigating these attacks, we present a set of machine learning models that…
Rank-ordering statistics provides a perspective on the rare, largest elements of a population, whereas the statistics of cumulative distributions are dominated by the more numerous small events. The exponent of a power law distribution can…
The evaluation of the probability of union of a large number of independent events requires several combinations involving the factorial and the use of high performance computers with several hours of processing. Bounds and simplifications…
In this paper, we have initiated an attempt to develop and understand the driving mechanisms that underlie fourth-generation warfare. We have undertaken this from a perspective of endeavoring to understand the drivers of these events from a…
The frequency and magnitude of weather extreme events have increased significantly during the past few years in response to anthropogenic climate change. However, global statistical characteristics and underlying physical mechanisms are…