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Network analysis of terrorist activities

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Abstract

This paper uses an extensive network approach to “East Turkistan” activities by building both the one-mode and the bipartite networks for these activities. In the one-mode network, centrality analysis and spectrum analysis are used to describe the importance of each vertex. On this basis, two types of core vertices — The center of communities and the intermediary vertices among communities — are distinguished. The weighted extreme optimization (WEO) algorithm is also applied to detect communities in the one-mode network. In the “terrorist-terrorist organization” bipartite network, the authors adopt centrality analysis as well as clustering analysis based on the original bipartite network in order to calculate the importance of each vertex, and apply the edge clustering coefficient algorithm to detect the communities. The comparative and empirical analysis indicates that this research has been proved to be an effective way to identify the core members, key organizations, and communities in the network of “East Turkistan” terrorist activity. The results can provide a scientific basis for the analysis of “East Turkistan” terrorist activity, and thus provide decision support for the real work of “anti-terrorism”.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information System and Management, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Julei Fu

  2. Department of Systems Science, School of Management and Center for Complexity Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Ying Fan & Yang Wang

  3. Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel

    Yang Wang

  4. Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Shouyang Wang

Authors
  1. Julei Fu
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  2. Ying Fan
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  3. Yang Wang
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  4. Shouyang Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ying Fan.

Additional information

This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants Nos. 70771011 and 61174150, the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of Ministry of Education of China under Grant No. NCET-09-0228, and Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China under Grant No. 20110003110027, and the China Scholarship Council (CSC).

This paper was recommended for publication by Editor DI Zengru.

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Fu, J., Fan, Y., Wang, Y. et al. Network analysis of terrorist activities. J Syst Sci Complex 27, 1079–1094 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-014-3034-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-014-3034-8

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