Sociocultural predictive analytics and terrorism deterrence

Frame analysis, which focuses on the communicative and mental processes, is used to develop a strategy for terrorism deterrence. The occurrence, or lack of frame annotations are used that are highly correlated with terrorist documents to train computational models that identify messages from terrorist sources and estimate their proximity to an attack. Communication differences between al Qa'ida (AQ) and Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) using various decision-tree (DT) algorithms with frame annotations from documents issued by AQ and AQAP sources were modeled. A strong correlation between group-member authorship and AQAP messages, and between group-leader authorship and AQ messages, is found. The alternating DT model shows that AQAP group leaders are more likely to target young Muslims, whereas AQ group leaders focus on other audiences.