Journal of Computer Information Systems

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Analyzing Relationships in Terrorism Big Data

Using Hadoop and Statistics

Kenneth David Strang & Zhaohao Sun

To cite this article: Kenneth David Strang & Zhaohao Sun (2017) Analyzing Relationships in
Terrorism Big Data Using Hadoop and Statistics, Journal of Computer Information Systems, 57:1,
67-75, DOI: 10.1080/08874417.2016.1181497

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JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS
2017, VOL. 57, NO. 1, 6775
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2016.1181497

Analyzing Relationships in Terrorism Big Data Using Hadoop and Statistics

Kenneth David Stranga and Zhaohao Sunb
a
State University of New York, Queensbury, NY, USA; bPapua New Guinea University of Technology, Lae, Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
We used big data software Hadoop in Google News to collect complex high-velocity, high-volume Hadoop; big data analytics;
terrorism information. We used big text search to code the factors of interest into nominal fields. We big text analytics; global
terrorist ideology
integrated new fields and records into an existing database drawn from other researchers. Our testable
hypothesis was that there was a significant relationship between terrorist group ideology and terrorist
attack type. Then we used correspondence analysis in SPSS to test our hypothesis. Our hypothesis was
supported, so we developed a symmetric model to visualize the hidden relationships between terrorist
ideology and attack type. Our purpose was to demonstrate how statistical software methods may be
applied in big data analytics. These methods will generalize to other researchers and practitioners. The
finding of a significant relationship between terrorist ideology and attack type may generalize to supply
chain operations and national security planning.

Introduction could use Hadoop for big data collection, and the results
could be integrated with text analytics and statistical software.
Big data analytics is an important topic to study from the busi-
This gives rise to our second proposition, that we can perform
ness practice standpoint because according to Gartner Group,
statistical analysis of terrorism big data.
organizations spent over $14 billion USD on those processes in
Global terrorism presents a risk to business operations [16].
2013 and this is increasing at an annual rate of 8% [1]. There is a
A quote from Garden (2001) about the 9/11 terrorists reminds
lack of documentation on how to apply big data analytics in
us about the seriousness and unpredictability of this complex
business operations since most studies are conceptual in nature
risk: if men armed only with knives can cause such mass
or they focus on commercial technology [25].
destruction, the world must review its assessment of threats
The academic community needs more literature for
[17]. Global terrorism data are complex, emerging rapidly and
designing studies and applying methods to analyze big data
there is no known limit to the activity volume [1821].
[612]. Big data analytics is so worthy of academic research
A few studies have been published about global terrorist
that the United States National Science Foundation [13] has a
behavior [2124]. However, predictive anti-terrorism analy-
dedicated program with US$100 million funding within the
tics are difficult to design and expensive to administer [20, 25,
Information and Intelligent Systems category. One of the
26]. Most studies focused on descriptive statistics of attack
three core practice groups is Information Integration and
types and religion [21, 24] but we do not understand how
Informatics, which focuses on developing techniques to ana-
ideology is related to terrorist behavior. Thus, our second
lyze data of unprecedented scale, complexity, and rate of
research proposition is that we could make a contribution to
acquisition, as well as issues of heterogeneity and complexity
the literature by integrating big data analytics with statistical
with innovative approaches and deep insights [13].
software to better understand the relationship between global
The authors have experience with big data software,
terrorist ideology and attack type.
namely Hadoop [14] as well as with the related applications
of Ambari, Avro, Cassandra, Chukwa, Flume, Hbase, Hive,
Mahout, Pig, Soir, Spark, Sqoop, Tez, YARN, and ZooKeeper Literature review
[15]. We find that none of those related applications provides
Big data analytics theoretical background
statistical analysis techniques without considerable program-
ming. Mahout is capable of machine learning through data The term and practice of big data analytics has garnered a lot
mining but it requires considerable programming once the of attention in the peer reviewed literature but most of the
data is collected. Thus, not only are there a lack of design studies were conceptual in nature or they focused on non-
guidelines for complex, high-velocity, large-volume big data operational topics [1, 2]. Big data generally refers to the
research, but there are also few examples of how to apply collection and analysis of large volumes of primary or sec-
statistical techniques. Our first research proposition is that we ondary data [1, 7]. More recently the meaning of big data has

CONTACT Kenneth David Strang kenneth.strang@gmail.com State University of New York, School of Business and Economics, 640 Bay Road, Regional
Higher Education Building, Queensbury, NY 12804, USA.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ucis.
2017 International Association for Computer Information Systems
68 K. D. STRANG AND Z. SUN
been extended to encompass information management and
information processing of increasing volumes of complex,
multiple data types [3, 4].
Data set size, complexity, and velocity are the most dis-
tinctive features differentiating big data analytics from other
methods including general analytics [7]. Complexity alone is
not a distinctive feature of big data either since even small
files may contain complicated relationships, such as recursive
hierarchies within and between qualitative data types identi-
fied through cluster analysis [27]. The benefits of big data
analytics as a process revolves around having a large sample of
thousands or millions of records along with the relevant
method to analyze the complex relationships hidden within it.
The key problem though is that customary analytical tools
used by business managers such as Excel or statistical soft-
ware, do not easily accommodate large files, or proprietary
Executive Information Systems can be too expensive or hard
to operate for small to medium-sized organizations. Another
key problem seems to be that organizations cannot identify
how to analyze these large files, the variety of content data
type is too widespread, or the velocity is too intense to
manage in a desktop software application [1, 7].
In addition to there being vague descriptions of what big
data files are, there are ambiguous methods about how to
analyze it. These generally accepted big data methods include:
Split files into manageable chunks; compress data to reduce
storage cost; and analyze data using statistical techniques to
obtain sharper, timelier business insights [5]. From a strategic
business perspective, big data can be used to help make
critical decisions, based on the concept of the law of large
numbers the more data in the sample then we may assume
the patterns are more representative of the norm and there-
fore statistical techniques may be used.
From a research methods stand point, increasing data
volume, complexity, velocity, and variety of data types present
many challenges for business analysts. The problem is that not
all data types can accommodate contemporary statistical
applications nor can these programs handle large files typical
of big data [1]. For example, financial transaction files gen-
erally contain numeric data, which may easily be analyzed
using statistics but social behavior big data generally contains
nominal data such as words or phrases [7]. Although nominal
big data types cannot generally be modeled to predict future
events, the analysis of non-metric fields such as attributes
could identify patterns within the information. Classification
techniques such as some forms of chi-square, logistic regres-
sion, and cluster analysis can accommodate nominal data
types to identify factors that may predict group membership
behavior [28].
The goal of big data analytics is either to describe the past
or predict the future. Describing the past could mean sum-
marizing or visualizing patterns, while predicting the future is
often thought of as forecasting, predicting, or in some dis-
ciplines the term used is supervised learning and therefore
unsupervised learning refers to non-predictive goals [29].
The principles of big data analytics can be found in disciplines
outside of business and management, such as mathematics,
statistics, computer science, information technology, and
operations research.
The techniques for big data analytics encompass a wide
range of mathematical, statistical, and modeling techniques
[1]. Unsupervised learning techniques generally include
descriptive statistics (e.g., means, standard deviations, med-
ians, or frequencies), distribution shape approximation (e.g.,
normal or something else), cluster analysis (k-means, hier-
archical, Bayesian), and dimension reduction (e.g., principal
component or factor analysis) [29]. Supervised learning tech-
niques often include regression (simple, multivariate, logistic,
probit, ordinal, nonlinear), conditional probability (maximum
likelihood estimation, odds ratio) [29] as well as deterministic
mathematical programming [8]. Correspondence analysis has
sometimes been used to identify hidden relationships in com-
plex qualitative data types such as keywords and categorical
factors [28]. When complex quantitative (metric) data types
are available, such as scaled factors and ratio dependent vari-
ables, principal component analysis, factor analysis, and struc-
tural equation modeling can be applied to identify hidden
relationships [28].
Text analysis involves information retrieval, lexical analysis
to study word frequency distributions, pattern recognition,
tagging/annotation, information extraction, data mining tech-
niques including link and association analysis, visualization,
and predictive analytics [30, 31]. The overarching goal is,
essentially, to turn text into data for analysis, via application
of natural language processing (NLP) and analytical methods.
Big text analytics is text analysis applied for big data
mining but alone if falls short of being considered big data
analytics because it identifies keyword frequencies but not the
hidden relationships between the factors [1, 3, 7]. Big text
analytics refers to the process of deriving high-quality infor-
mation from text, such as patterns and trends through means
such as statistical pattern learning [5, 31]}. Text mining
usually involves the process of structuring the input text
(usually parsing, along with the addition of some derived
linguistic features and the removal of others, and subsequent
insertion into a database), deriving patterns within the struc-
tured data, and finally evaluation and interpretation of the
output [30]. The difference between big text analytics and
merely producing a frequency table of keyword patterns is
that the resulting model will show a combination of relevance,
novelty, and interestingness within the data [30]. Typical text
mining tasks include text categorization, text clustering, con-
cept/entity extraction, production of granular taxonomies,
sentiment analysis, document summarization, and entity rela-
tionship modeling as would be found in database design
schema [30].
Big data analysis of global terrorism
The most current high-volume, high-velocity primary global
terrorism data evidence in English are available in the online
news media, from the Associated Press [16]. There is also
some secondary data available in the scholarly literature.
Weinberg, Pedahzur and Hirsch-Hoefler [18] conducted a
meta-analysis of 55 manuscripts containing 73 distinct ver-
sions of terrorism. They suggested that terrorism should be
defined as: a politically motivated tactic involving the threat
or use of force or violence in which the pursuit of publicity

plays a significant role [18]. On a global scale there have been
approximately 125,000 recognized terrorism events around
the world since 1970 [21]. Thus, global terrorism evidence
are complex, highvelocity, and voluminous, which makes it a
problem suitable for big data analytics [1820]. Chunking is a
sampling approach that may be applied to high-velocity big
data, such as taking samples during stratified or random
periods. Given that most primary terrorism activity is
reported in the online media, day is a natural delimiter for
chunking global terrorism big data into portions that
researchers may practically deal with.
Anti-terrorism measures are expensive to administer
[20, 25]. For example, the 9/11 terrorism event caused
approximately US$123 billion in economic losses and the
London bombings in 2005 were estimated to cost England
UK2 billion [22, 32]. We still dont know the long-term
socioeconomic costs of the Boston bomber terrorist act
that occurred in the United States during the spring of
2013.
Recent attacks in Pakistan (150 school children died),
Canada (the government was targeted in Ottawa and in
Quebec), as well as Australia (Lindt Caf siege in Sydney)
illustrated that government, businesses, and individuals are
impacted by global terrorism and thus it would be useful to
know what and where the risks are [24]. This is a classical big
data analytics task due to the fact that factors of terrorist
group behavior are complex to understand [24], the data are
high-velocity [21], and the volume is large [21] since the
evidence is scattered around the world.
Terrorist groups tend to have behavioral patterns in their
frequency, target country/region, ideology, and attack type
[24]. There are patterns between religion (Christian, Hindu,
Jewish, Sikh, Muslim) and terrorist ideology, especially with
certain diasporas (groups), notably those with Sikh and
Muslim beliefs, but the Oakland Bomber Tim McVeigh is
proof that Christians may also be terrorists. Some of the
modern terrorism groups are Environmentalists, because
since 1976, environmental terrorists within the United States
have carried out over 1000 criminal acts and caused over US
$110 million worth of damage.
In general, terrorist ideology can be placed on a continuum
from left to right. The left-wing extremists are Communists,
Maoists, and Marxists; the left-wing moderates are socialists,
environmentalists, and anti-government; with the right-wing
moderates being Islamic; toward the right-wing extremists are
radical Islamic and jihadists. Left-wing extremists (Maoists,
Marxists, Communists, and Socialists) oppose capitalism,
feudalism, inequality, and exploitation [19, 33]. Moderate
left-wing terrorist groups may also be known as Anarchists,
differentiated from other criminal violence by the political
end-state as their goal instead of merely killing people or
damaging property [34]. These are better known to have
arisen with the outburst of decolonization during the late
1950s and 1960s, such as in Cuba [35]. The term narcoter-
rorists was used in the early 1980s by President Fernando
Belaunde Terry of Peru to describe the Anarchist terrorists
who attacked his police forces when they attempted to elim-
inate drug trafficking [20, 36].
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 69
The right-wing moderate conservatism is a political philo-
sophy that resists any change in the existing political, eco-
nomic, social, and religious institutions and beliefs [33]. It
aims to protect traditional values. There are three core Islamic
diasporas: Islamism, Salafism, and Wahhabismall are core
beliefs of Muslim communities [19]. The Jihadist terrorist
groups are an extreme form of constructed Islamic religion
[37]. There are also smaller cult and racially motivated terror-
ist groups. Finally we have the lone wolf who often claims to
be part of recognized terrorist cult [38, 39]. We developed this
nominal scale to categorize terrorist group ideology:
1 = Moderate left (Cults);
2 = Extreme left (Marxism);
3 = Left wing (Socialism);
4 = Right strong (Narcoterrorism);
5 = Right strong (Anarchism);
6 = Extreme left (Maoism);
7 = Left moderate (Anti-Government);
8 = Right moderate (Environmentalism);
9 = Right (Islamism);
10 = Extreme right (Jihadism);
11 = Moderate left (Separatism);
12 = Left wing (Communism);
13 = Moderate right (Lone Wolf).
The type of a terrorist attack may be related to, and a
signature of, a terrorist ideology and a gauge as to the pre-
dictability of future attempts. Terrorist attack types may be
categorized into nine nominal types, as briefly enumerated
below (adapted from: 19, 22, 23, 24, 40):
(1) Assassinations, where the primary goal is to kill one
or more important people;
(2) Armed assaults, usually done with powerful firearms
such as guns or, but could also include, knives, clubs,
or personal-use explosives namely grenades;
(3) Barricading, taking people hostage only for the pur-
poses of preventing access to or use of a facility, such
as a train station, government building, when the
intention is to not kidnap people;
(4) Hijacking, taking control of a vehicle such as a plane
(most common), bus, train, ship, submarine, helicop-
ter, generally items that could be moved;
(5) Bombs, explosions, which are generally bombs, often
from nuclear fission or fusion, dynamite, or it could
also be through chemicals or gases;
(6) Kidnapping, which is hostage taking when the objec-
tive is to use the people to obtain economic value
such as a ransom or political concessions;
(7) Infrastructure attacks are non-human targets of ter-
rorism, such as a road, bridge, building, train, oil/gas
pipeline, canal, train or train track, truck, oil tanker,
warehouse, water reservoir, and so on;
(8) Unarmed assaults occurs in situations when terrorists
dont use weapons only their body, fists, feet, bite, etc.;
(9) Multiple methods, unknown combinations.
70 K. D. STRANG AND Z. SUN
Literature synthesis and research questions
Our first research proposition is that we could use Hadoop for
big data sampling, and the results could be integrated with
text analytics and statistical software. This would be valuable
to illustrate as a research design for big data analytics studies.
We hypothesize that we can summarize terrorist activities by
day through using Hadoop by researching the text archives of
Google News (http://news.google.com) who carry the
Associated Press releases. We anticipate leveraging the work
of other researchers to initially build the big database of key-
words (e.g., 24), and then we will extend the data to cover
recent periods.
Our second research proposition is that we could make a
contribution to the literature by integrating big data analytics
with statistical software to better understand the relationship
between global terrorist ideology and attack type. We
hypothesize that we will be able to identify a significant
relationship in the global terrorism big data between ideology
and attack type, which would be useful for input to risk
planning for businesses, government, or any type of organiza-
tion. Thus, by fulfilling the two research propositions and
testing the general hypothesis, the findings should generalize
to academic researchers (as the research design method) as
well as to risk management practitioners (both the design and
the results).
H1: there will be a significant relationship between terrorist
group or individual ideology (left to right) and terrorist attack
type.
Methodology
We held a positivist ideology, so we collected a large relevant
sample of empirical data and we applied statistical techniques
for the analysis.
Descriptive and nonparametric statistical analysis techni-
ques were applied since this study was at the exploratory stage
with no a priori models [28] and the objective was to demon-
strate how big data analytics could be designed and applied to
global terrorism. SPSS version 21 was used for the statistical
modeling analysis. The 95% level of confidence was used for
all statistical tests. The policy was to retain all outliers since
the nature of this study was exploratory and descriptive.
Sample
According to Strang and Alamieyeseigha [24], they collected
secondary global terrorism activity data from the newspapers
and from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism
and Responses to Terrorism (START), located at the
University of Maryland, USA. One terrorism data set was
initially developed by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence
Service (PGIS)a private security agency in the United
Statescovering terrorism activity during 19701997.
Terrorism acts that occurred between 1998 and March 2008
were collected by the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence
Studies (CETIS), in partnership with START. A third data set
was created for terrorist acts between April 2008 and October
2011, with efforts led by the Institute for the Study of Violent
Groups (ISVG) at the University of New Haven. Beginning
with cases that occurred in November 2011 onward, a fourth
data set was used [41].
Several other publicly available global terrorism data sets
were researched to supplement the above. ITERATE
(International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events)
from Duke University (http://library.duke.edu/data/collec
tions/iterate), RDWTI (RAND Database of Worldwide
Terrorism Incidents) from RAND Corporation (http://www.
rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents.html, and WITS
(Worldwide Incidents Tracking System) from the Terrorism
Research& Analysis Consortium (http://www.trackingterror
ism.org) were accessed.
Big data text search procedures and variables
We obtained the global terrorism big data set (GTBD) in an
SPSS SAV format from Strang and Alamieyeseigha [24]the
size was 60.048 MB, it contained 125,087 records with 133
fields totaling 16,636,571 data points. We extended this data
using Hadoop big text analytics accessed via Google Analytics
by searching Google News for terrorism keywords during the
time period 20132014 (one year).
We were interested in the qualitative fields, namely the
terrorist attack type, along with the country and ideology.
As noted earlier, the global terrorism data set contained a
field named terrorist attack type, which was nominally coded
into one of nine types coded as: assassinations, armed assaults,
bombing/explosions, hijacking, barricading, kidnapping,
infrastructure, unarmed assaults, and unknown/mixed. We
accessed Hadoop big data text analytics (by searching for
the attack type or attack method and noting the phrases
that were adjacent). Since we were also interested in the
ideology, we used if conditions in big text analytics software
to search the news media coverage for the 13 ideology key-
words identified earlier. We added the ideology as a nominal
type to each record so that it could later be counted. For cases
where multiple ideologies were identified, we manually
reviewed the story and subjectively selected the most relevant
keyword. We added 30 more global terrorism records to the
global terrorism data (GTD) data set (N = 125,117).
Big data nominal field relationship analysis
The logical choice of big data analytic technique for nominal
field relationship comparisons where the keywords could be
counted (frequencies) would be cluster or correspondence
analysis. Both these methods reduce the complexity of the
big data into groups or factor dimensions. The purpose of
cluster analysis is to group similar records together, generally
based on average distance of the mean within the factors,
whereas correspondence analysis goes a step further by iden-
tifying potential hidden relationships between factors. Cluster
analysis identifies similar versus different records while corre-
spondence determines the strength and direction of the asso-
ciation between factors. Both are capable of producing
visualization maps of the results. Since the objective here
was to identify important factor relationships between

terrorist attack type and ideology, correspondence analysis
was the best choice.
Additionally, a table of big data descriptive statistics is
difficult to interpret to support decision-making. A bar or
line chart could be developed to visualize the descriptive
statistics but that would not uncover any underlying non-
linear associations between attack type and ideology.
Therefore, correspondence analysis was applied to better
address the research mandate.
A review of the empirical literature or a research design
handbook is generally the starting point when trying to iden-
tify appropriate techniques for big data analytics. Strang [42]
used a technique similar to cluster analysis to describe the
relationship between asset managers and the portfolio techni-
ques they used. Although that was not a big data analytics
study, his approach is relevant to note here. He interviewed 39
asset managers from companies listed on the NYSE, asking
them about their choice of portfolio management technique,
along with other questions about their demographics (gender,
company size, and so on). He used multiple correspondence
analysis, which he explained was a nonparametric statistical
technique to compare the interdependence between more
than two nominal factors. Strang [43] also conducted a similar
study by interviewing 211 financial managers to identify the
nature and quality of the relationship between risk manage-
ment technique and functional discipline.
Correspondence analysis falls within the family of multi-
variate exploratory techniques capable of producing statistical
estimates and graphical diagrams of nonmetric variable rela-
tionships. Common variations include dimensional analysis,
multidimensional scaling, simple or multiple correspon-
dence analysis, conjoint analysis, choice models, discri- visualized.
minant analysis, Euclidian distance analysis, spatial
segmentation as well as vector analysis of contingency
tables [44].
While common nonparametric procedures such as chi-
square test of independence or goodness of fit can be used
on the nominal big data types such as terrorist attack type and
ideology, chi-square methods do not indicate that nature
relationship between the content of the factors, only that
there may or may not be a relationship between factors in
the overall model [44]. Also, as explained earlier, cluster
analysis does not examine the nature of factor relationships,
only group similarity or dissimilarity.
Correspondence analysis is particularly useful for trans-
forming complex qualitative big data into relationship-inter-
dependence diagrams, by comparing the relationship between
two nominal variables in tables as well as visually through a
multidimensional plot. Factors that are similar to each other
appear close to each other in the plots, which indicates that
they are related without loss of attribute detail as would be the
case when applying cluster analysis [42]. In this way it is as
powerful as traditional factor analysis to reduce the complex-
ity of big data but principal component and factor analysis
require quantitative, not qualitative, data [44].
Correspondence analysis calculates inertia estimates of
variable interdependencies and, if significant, a symmetric
plot can be drawn by converting the inertias into Euclidian
distance coordinates to visually depict the relative strength of
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 71
the relationships [44]. According to Strang [42], there are two
basic forms of this technique, the first is simple correspon-
dence analysis (with the word simple not usually mentioned)
and the second is multiple correspondence analysis; simple is
used with two factors and multiple correspondence analysis is
used when there are more than two factors. Simple corre-
spondence analysis would be ideal to meet our mandate for
nominal factor relationship testing and visualization. The
advantage of using this over cluster analysis is that it does
not try to classify records into groups but rather it uses the
content of the fields to estimate the correlation between
factors, e.g., correspondence.
In SPSS, simple correspondence analysis version 1.1 was
developed by the Data Theory Scaling System Group (DTSS),
at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences in Leiden
University, The Netherlands [45]. We selected DTSS symme-
trical normalization in SPSS because this is the best-practice
method to spread the inertia evenly over the row and column
factors for a two-dimensional plot [45, 46]. Normalization
means to estimate the Euclidean distance scores or inertia
(negative or positive association between factors and a cen-
troid location). For reference purposes, three other normal-
ization choices exist [45]. Row principle normalization
maximizes and emphasizes the distances between row factors,
while column principle normalization emphasizes the same
for the column factor (generally the second factor in the
correspondence analysis). A fourth option seems to have
become available in SPSS, which is principal normalization,
whereby the inertia is spread twice in the solution matrix
following the symmetrical concept but a plot is not yet avail-
able for this [45], so the big data relationships cannot be
Results and discussion
Descriptive statistics of terrorism big data
The terrorism big data were coded with the 13 ideologies and
the nine attack types. Due to the size of the nominal codes for
ideology and attack type, so we chose use numbers for display
purposes in the tables and plots (following the same enumera-
tion of our literature review).
First, we calculated the frequencies of global terrorism
attack type and ideologies (N = 125,117). However, it is
difficult to interpret the relationships between terrorist attack
types and the ideologies by examining only a table of frequen-
cies, so we selected to use a symmetric plot in correspondence
analysis to visualize the relationships.
Correspondence analysis of terrorism big data
Table 1 lists the statistical estimates from correspondence
analysis of the global terrorism big data set whereby the two
nominal factors were attack type by ideology. The proportion
of inertia shows the breakdown of the association between
terrorist attack type and ideology accounted for by each
dimension. The cumulative inertia proportion column
reveals that most of the interdependence was identified by
the primary and secondary axes, amounting to 95% (0.945) of
72 K. D. STRANG AND Z. SUN

Table 1. Correspondence analysis estimates of terrorist attack type by ideology (N = 125,117).

Proportion of inertia Confidence singular value
Dimension Singular value Inertia Accounted Cumulative Standard Correlation 2
1 0.385 0.148 0.687 0.687 0.001 0.210
2 0.236 0.056 0.258 0.945 0.002
3 0.085 0.007 0.034 0.978
4 0.065 0.004 0.020 0.998
5 0.018 0.000 0.001 0.999
6 0.010 0.000 0.001 1.000
7 0.005 0.000 0.000 1.000
8 0.002 0.000 0.000 1.000
Total 0.215 1.000 1.000

the total inertia. The first dimension captured 0.687 of the
inertia and the second accounted for 0.258 of the total inertia.
The third dimension added only 3.4% (0.034) to the
accounted-for inertia and is therefore justification for pro-
ceeding with a two-dimensional visual model to facilitate
decision-making (two factors are easier to plot than three).
The estimated overall association (correlation) of two factors
was 0.21 (low).
Table 2 contains the details of the inertia and contribution
estimates for correspondence analysis, by row since we could
focus first on attack type and then determine how ideology
was related to each attack type. We elected to not display the
estimates by column (ideology) since this would not add any
value to this analysis, and due to space limitations, but the
authors will make this information available to anyone by
request. The most important estimates to discuss for big
data analysis are the mass, dimension score, inertia, and
symmetric contribution.
The symmetric plot in Figure 1 shows the interdependence
of dimensional plot for global terrorism attack type by ideol-
ogy. The triangles (blue) are the attack types and the circles
(green) represent the ideologies. The primary dimension is the
horizontal axis 1 and the secondary dimension is the vertical
axis 2 (the primary axis is calculated first and therefore will
have larger variance-captured estimates). Interpretations of
the four quadrants have been superimposed on the symmetric
plot axis labels (as discussed below). The interpretation of the
symmetric plot will require referencing back to the estimates
in Tables 12.
First there are some rules about interpreting symmetric
plots. Strang [42] likened the interpretation of a dimensional
symmetric plot to identifying points of a profile group situ-
ated away from the origin, but close to each other. Nearby
points will have similar profiles in the subspace, in a
geometrical sense, so in a nonlinear sense the content of the
factors in this space are related in some underlying way. Mass
and inertia are the key estimates in Tables 12 that identify
the contribution of the factors to the axes in the symmetric
plot. Mass will play a large role for initially determining the
centroids and axes.
Proximity between points on the symmetric plot does not
necessarily mean strong relationships because the association
is to the axis, with evidence of interdependence to other
points of the same category. The strength of a relationship is
measured on a symmetric plot based on the degree of simi-
larity of the angle between points from the origin.
The mass theoretically refers to the weight of the cell in the
full dimensional matrix (not just one axis). The mass for a
variable is a simple calculation of the proportion of frequen-
cies in the cell/total frequencies for the contingency matrix.
Larger mass estimates mean that an attack type or ideology
appears more frequently in the data. Theoretically, the
moment of inertia represents the mass and Euclidian dis-
tance of each point from the center of gravity on the dimen-
sional plot (centroid). Inertia is the eigen (), calculated by the
weighted average of the chi-square distances from the axis
centroid to the projections of the profiles (points on the plot
in Figure 1). As compared to mass (which essentially mea-
sures frequencies), inertia estimates the degree of interdepen-
dence between a variable and both dimensional axis
quadrants.
Inertia in Tables 12 is the proportion of the inertia repre-
sented by both axis dimensions. The contribution columns in
Tables 12 are similar to the communality for a variable in
factor analysis. Thus, quality is a reliability ratio (somewhat
like r2); with a minimum expectation of 0.5 but a preferred
proportion is 0.7 to meet the strong dimensional quality
level threshold.

Table 2. Correspondence analysis details of terrorist attack type by ideology (N = 125,117).

Symmetric contribution
Score in dimension Of point to inertia of dimension Of dimension to inertia of point
Terrorist attack type Mass 1 2 Inertia 1 2 1 2 Total
1 Assassination 0.111 0.253 0.458 0.011 0.018 0.099 0.248 0.498 0.745
2 Armed assault 0.111 1.249 0.642 0.079 0.451 0.194 0.847 0.137 0.984
3 Barricading 0.111 0.038 0.056 0.000 0.000 0.001 0.136 0.185 0.321
4 Hijacking 0.111 0.001 0.012 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.001 0.176 0.177
5 Bombs 0.111 1.316 0.796 0.091 0.500 0.299 0.814 0.182 0.996
6 Kidnapping 0.111 0.229 0.091 0.006 0.015 0.004 0.380 0.037 0.417
7 Infrastructure 0.111 0.131 0.922 0.026 0.005 0.401 0.029 0.870 0.899
8 Unarmed assault 0.111 0.000 0.024 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.142 0.142
9 Multiple method 0.111 0.183 0.057 0.003 0.010 0.002 0.562 0.033 0.594
Total 1.000 0.215 1.000 1.000

Figure 1. Symmetric plot of global terrorist attack type by ideology for 19702014.
The scores in Tables 1 and 2 are the coordinates or dis-
tances from the centroid. These are the principal coordinates
of the variable for each axis, which are used for plotting.
These represent the proportional contribution of the factor
inertia to a specific axis dimension (larger amounts are bet-
ter). Contributions are estimates of the variance calculated
with respect to the entire set of variables and can therefore
be interpreted for relative association. Explained points are
those whose contributions to the eccentricity are greater than
a certain threshold, such as 0.25 [42]. The overall contribu-
tions shown in Tables 1 and 2 are like factor scores in factor
analysis, because they inherently suggest how related the
factors on the same side of the axis are (and vice versa, lack
of interdependence is indicated by axis separation). At this
point we were able to accept the hypothesis that there was a
significant relationship between terrorist ideology (left to
right) and terrorist attack type.
The next step was to name the dimensions and identify any
clusters based on the decomposition of inertia measures
across each axis. Also, the symmetric plot may be visualized
to interpret it. Several points in the symmetric plot (Figure 1)
stand out and thus strongly influence the interpretation of the
symmetric plot dimensions. Attack type 2 (armed assault) and
ideology 2 (Marxism) stand out on the left part of x-axis as do
ideology 11 (Separatism) and 5 (Anarchism) seem related as
terrorist ideologies. Likewise, attack type 5 (bombing) along
with ideology 10 (Jhidadism) are in close proximity and stand
alone on the top of the y-axis. In similar fashion, attack type 1
(assassination) and 7 (infrastructure) are isolated and close to
ideology 8 (Environmentalism) on the bottom of the y-axis.
The remaining points (attack types and ideologies) are densely
clustered in the middle of the symmetric plot.
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 73
Based on the above analysis, x-axis dimension 1 was
named Target specificity (individual vs. mass) to represent
what we thought was a pattern of individual terrorist targets
using assassination and armed assaults on the leftmost dimen-
sion as compared to using methods of mass destruction such
as bombing and destroying infrastructure but not necessarily
with a specific target in sight. The y-axis dimension 2 was
captioned Target culture (west vs. east) since we recognized
the Central and North America with Western European ideol-
ogies on the bottom in contrast to the Muslim-dominated
Middle East and Southeast Asian ideologies on the top.
When viewed together, the dimensions seem to illustrate a
pattern of mass destruction attack types against the eastern
ideologies such as Middle East, as compared to assassinations
and armed attacks directed toward Western culture ideologies
(USA, European Union countries, and Australia).
The symmetric plot and inertia estimates from Tables 1
and 2 could be used to estimate the risk of developing part-
nerships, removing assets, or expanding existing operations in
regions possessing the ideologies where terrorist attack types
are more common and destructive. Of course the granularity
of the symmetric plot at the region level is too broad (we used
it only for an example)instead the city and country or the
geographic coordinates could be used to produce a more
accurate estimate of the areas that would be more likely to
experience certain types of global terrorism attack types. In
another perspective the symmetric plot suggests that there
may be patterns of terrorist attack types with certain countries
where goods may be shipped through, so this would be of
great value to serve as input for decision-making in supply
chain management. For example, based on these results,
would you recommend using a warehouse or transporting
74 K. D. STRANG AND Z. SUN
your valuable products with companies where these terrorist
attack types and ideologies are present?
Conclusions
We conducted this study primarily because such a study was
recommended by several well-known big data analytics
researchers who asserted that there were too few practical
worked-out examples in the literature [13]. More so,
Kauffman, Srivastava and Vayghan [31] had found that data
analytics techniques did not work well with large amounts of
data. We specifically addressed that gap in the literature with
our study by using a large big data set over 64 MB in size with
over 125,117 records showing how to collect, code, and ana-
lyze terrorism big data. We used Hadoop big data analytics
software through Google to collect and search through the
terrorism big data and then we used a well-known statistical
programSPSSto analyze hidden relationships in the nom-
inal coded factors.
We justified the use of correspondence analysis, from SPSS,
as a big data analytical technique, once we had collected and
coded terrorism big data through Hadoop. This allowed us to
produce descriptive statistics on the factors of interest (attack
types and ideologies) and also to identify interdependence
relationships between attack type and ideology using a sym-
metric plot. The plot provided a visual model to complement
the statistical estimates from correspondence analysis. We
were able to accept the hypothesis that there was a significant
relationship between terrorist ideology (left to right) and
terrorist attack type.
The results of this terrorism big data analytics could be
used by business managers to inform their choice of selecting
marketing partners or supply chain providers, or to scale
down operations in a potentially risky area. Nonetheless, the
purpose of our study was not merely to generalize these
specific correspondence analysis results for business decision
makers; instead the ultimate goal was to generalize the big
data analytics design methodology for other practitioners and
researchers.
Another implication is that practitioners may achieve
scientific credibility of their findings through the rigor of
hypothesis testing by using parametric or nonparametric sta-
tistical techniques in big data analytics. These findings gen-
eralize broadly to course designers at universities, to
organizational researchers, to department of defense govern-
ment departments, and to students who are collecting big data
with the intention to perform analytics. However, business
practitioners, analysts, and academic researchers need more
information about how to use these approaches with large
data files, and more so, how to design process to answer real-
world business problems. It might even be feasible to call for a
big data analytics methodology guidebook to be published for
practitioners and researchers.
Another implication of our study is that other researchers
ought to publish similar empirical papers to demonstrate
other methods for qualitative and quantitative terrorism big
data analytics, particularly to investigate complex relation-
ships between the nominal factors and quantitative variables.
Big data is getting bigger and more analytics programs are
becoming available on the Internet through open source soft-
ware. We also encourage other researchers and practitioners
to share their data with others by indicating how it may be
accessed in their publications.
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