Research Summaries

Back Network Classification with Incomplete Information

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department NPS Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Yoshida, Ruriko
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Due to the recent emergence of China, seeking not only to increase its influence in its own neighborhood but also to supplant the U.S. as the global power while changing the international rules, social network analysis is increasingly leveraged by the Department of Defense to develop strategies to combat criminal and terrorist organizations. It is important to understand and correctly classify criminal and terrorist networks in order to improve our ability to destroy them since it informs the optimal strategy for dismantling such networks based on their network structure. However, these strategies typically assume complete information about the underlying network. Due to the limited ability of an analyst to access all of the information of the network, our inability to detect all members of these networks, and the efforts of criminal organizations to hide their activities and structure, analysts must classify such networks and develop strategies to destroy them with missing information. This research will analyze the performance of a variety of network statistics in the context of incomplete information by simulation to remove nodes and edges from networks and evaluating the effect of missing information on our ability to accurately classify the underlying structure of the network. We will provide recommendations to intelligence analysts, which statistics provide the most information, conditions under which it is reasonable to assert a classification, and a framework for the evaluation of network statistics for the purposes of classifying networks under incomplete information. We will provide simulated data sets and software to conduct network analysis written in R.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal