SuicideWatch: Proposal
The threat of terrorism is growing everyday and many countries, including Singapore, have taken steps to mitigate the risks of terrorism. In the National Day Rally 2016, PM Mr. Lee Hsien Loong mentioned that diplomats and security forces have been doing their job well but despite their efforts, it does not mean that terrorist attacks will not happen in Singapore. The recent attack that attempted to fire a rocket to hit Marina Bay Sands Area from Batam was successfully intervened but this signals to the country that the terrorism threat should not be taken lightly. In response to the growing terrorist threat, the SGSecure Movement was launched to prepare the public in the event of an attack. In recent years, there is a rise in research on terrorist organizations and the activities they have performed, regardless of scale, over the years. However, more still needs to be done to analyze past terrorist activities and gain insights from it easily so that all countries could better prepare for a worst case scenario.
In this project, we are interested to create a visualization that helps analysts perform the following:
- Identify the target victims of terrorist attacks across countries
- Explore each country’s existing political climate
- Compare the political climate of each country
- Establish possible correlations of a country’s political climate with the number of terrorist attacks happening in a country
By conducting the analysis, it allows respective policy makers, government or intelligence agencies to better identify potential linkages between how well a country is governed (political climate) and the potential for future terrorist attacks. If a link between how well a country is governed and the occurrence of terrorist attacks could be established, policy makers and government agencies can take steps to improve the political conditions/way in which their country is governed. By targeting at a potential root cause of terrorist attacks, it aims to reduce the number of terrorist attacks happening across different parts of the world.
In our analysis, we will only be using data within the year of 2000 - 2015. The rationale for the range of data selected is as follows:
- It does not provide strong relevance/insights for analysts to look at all the data in the past 45 years and attempt to predict activities of these terrorist organizations now/in the future. Due to rapid changes in the globalized world, a range of 15 years will be adequate to help analysts spot trends/patterns of terrorist activities.
- Due to limitations of the data collected on each country's governance indicators, the dataset only provides information from year 2000 - 2015.
- Due to technical limitations, loading past 45 years of data (156,773 records) into the application may cause it to become non-responsive and users may not be satisfied with the response rate. A range of 15 years (87,010 records) will yield just enough data for an insightful analysis and yet, does not sacrifice on the application's response rate.
The dataset for analysis will be retrieved from multiple databases, as elaborated below:
