An intelligent pattern recognition model for assessment of terrorists’ activities in Nigeria

Abstract

Terrorism and its brutal tendencies constitute a major setback to the development process of the Nigerian economy leading to severe loss of lives, destruction of properties, and a decline of interest in investment by both local and foreign investors. Many models for assessment of terrorist’s activities lack the ability of learning from previous patterns in order to guide pre-emptive actions against future occurrences, and there are no established regional pattern of weaponry, types of attack, as well as types of victims of terrorists’ operations. This study seeks to build a robust intelligent model for recognizing several terrorists’ patterns in each of the six geo-political zones of Nigeria. A data set of 5,503 instances of terrorists’ activities in Nigeria was obtained and a pattern recognition model was built using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with 70%, 15%, and 15% data splits for training, validation, and testing respectively. A 10-10-6 ANN architecture was designed and trained using the scaled conjugate gradient backpropagation algorithm. The training was carried out using Matlab’s neural network pattern recognition toolkit. In order to numerically represent categorical data, a sort-order scheme was developed by the authors and utilized. The results showed average percentage scores for accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score as 99.89, 99.96, 100 and 99.98 respectively. This showed acceptable performance. The developed model is therefore considered a robust one for recognition of terrorists’ patterns in Nigeria. This would assist security agencies to deal with terrorists’ incidences with high intelligent information and advanced preparation for prevention and control. The developed model is highly recommended for use by the security agencies in the country.