Which Centrality Metric for Which Terrorist Network Topology?

摘要

Recently, an exponential growth in the use of social network analysis (SNA) tools has been witnessed. SNA offers quantitative measures known as centralities which allow the identification of important nodes in a given network. In fact, determining such nodes in terrorist networks is a way to destabilize these cells and prevent their criminal activities. Identifying key players is highly dependent on structural characteristics of nodes. Therefore, many approaches rely on centrality metrics to propose various disruption strategies. Indeed, knowledge of these measures helps in revealing vulnerabilities of terrorist networks and may have important implications for investigations. It is debatable how to choose the suitable centrality measure that helps effectively to destabilize the terrorist network. In this paper, we aim to answer this question. We first provide an analytical study where we identify 6 topologies of terrorist networks and discuss the appropriate metrics per topology. Secondly, we provide the performed experimental analysis on five data sets (with 5 different topologies) to prove our analytical conclusions.