Investigative Data Mining: Identifying Key Nodes in Terrorist Networks

The concern about national security has increased significantly since the 9/11 attacks. However, information overload and lack of advanced, automated techniques hinders the effective analysis of criminal and terrorist activities. Data mining applied in the context of law enforcement and intelligence analysis, called investigative data mining (IDM), holds the promise of alleviating such problems. In this paper, we present an understanding to show how IDM works and the importance of this approach in identifying key nodes in terrorist networks.