Forecasting Violent Extremist Cyber Recruitment

The Internet’s increasing use as a means of communication has led to the formation of cyber communities, which have become appealing to violent extremist (VE) groups. This paper presents research on forecasting the daily level of cyber-recruitment activity of VE groups. We used a previously developed support vector machine model to identify recruitment posts within a Western jihadist discussion forum. We analyzed the textual content of this data set with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and we fed these analyses into a variety of time series models to forecast cyber-recruitment activity within the forum. Quantitative evaluations showed that employing LDA-based topics as predictors within time series models reduces forecast error compared with naive (random-walk), autoregressive integrated moving average, and exponential smoothing baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result reported on this forecasting task. This research could ultimately help assist with efficient allocation of intelligence analysts in response to predicted levels of cyber-recruitment activity.