Article ID: | iaor20051058 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 38 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 473 |
End Page Number: | 487 |
Publication Date: | Dec 2004 |
Journal: | Decision Support Systems |
Authors: | Chen Hsinchun, Xu Jennifer J. |
Keywords: | law & law enforcement |
Effective and efficient link analysis techniques are needed to help law enforcement and intelligence agencies fight organized crimes such as narcotics violation, terrorism, and kidnapping. In this paper, we propose a link analysis technique that uses shortest-path algorithms, priority-first-search (PFS) and two-tree PFS, to identify the strongest association paths between entities in a criminal network. To evaluate effectiveness, we compared the PFS algorithms with crime investigators' typical association-search approach, as represented by a modified breadth-first-search (BFS). Our domain expert considered the association paths identified by PFS algorithms to be useful about 70% of the time, whereas the modified BFS algorithm's precision rates were only 30% for a kidnapping network and 16.7% for a narcotics network. Efficiency of the two-tree PFS was better for a small, dense kidnapping network, and the PFS was better for the large, sparse narcotics network.