Are global terrorist attacks time-correlated?

Luciano Telesca and Michele Lovallo

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2006, vol. 362, issue 2, 480-484

Abstract: Is there any kind of “memory” in the sequence of terror attacks worldwide? Are the terrorist attacks non-randomly time distributed? Our analysis suggests that they are correlated, which means that a terror event is not independent from the time elapsed since the previous event. But, if we consider terror attacks with a large severity index (number of fatalities or injured), the phenomenon is unpredictable, since it approaches a Poisson process (random, independent and uncorrelated).

Keywords: Terrorism; Allan factor; Scaling; Correlation; Time-clustering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:362:y:2006:i:2:p:480-484

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2005.08.030

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