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Introduction
Contents: Today government agencies face greater challenges than ever before.
In addition to promoting public safety, combating crime and gang
1 Introduction
violence, agencies have the added burden of helping to guard against
2 Applications of predictive analytics terrorism and to control the outbreak of infectious diseases.
7 Other applications
To meet these challenges, agencies are trying a variety of approaches.
7 Conclusion Innovative information technologies are playing a key role in improving
your ability to anticipate events and act appropriately. Predictive analytics
8 About SPSS, an IBM Company
is one of those technologies.
Highlights
With predictive analytics, you can base daily operational decisions on
• Use predictive analytics to improve data-driven models that precisely describe current and developing
border security, law enforcement,
conditions. This enables you to:
intrusion threat detection, infectious
disease control, anti-money laundering
and terrorist financing detection. • Improve your prevention capability and control costs by deploying
personnel where they’re needed most
• Uncover hidden patterns and insights
from large amounts of structured and • Predict which types of events are most likely to escalate so you can
unstructured data. guard against this escalation
• Conduct new investigations more efficiently
• Employ predictive models to anticipate
threats, identify suspicious actors and • Discover patterns in your data that suggest areas for further
effectively allocate resources. investigation
• Explore security threats and study the people and organizations
• Create an automated process for
building models that analyze involved
location-specific data. • Deliver information to the field, where and when it’s needed
One large country implemented the following scenario with IBM SPSS
predictive analytics. The challenge at this country’s border crossings is
best described as follows:
“We cannot stop and search every car that crosses the border. However,
if we can accurately predict the risk level associated with each vehicle –
whether it may be carrying contraband, drugs, money, weapons or illegal
immigrants – we can make optimal use of our inspection staff, increase
our detection rates, better protect the country and its citizens and
improve the experience of innocent travelers by expediting their
crossing.”
Models are then built from the outcomes of these historical inspections.
The data used is keyed by vehicle registration and would include vehicle
type (including dimensions, capacities, etc.); vehicle ownership (and
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Business Analytics
hence any available information on the owner or driver); and the vehicle’s
history of border crossings at this or other checkpoints. Other factors
giving information about the crossing would also be incorporated – for
example the day of the week, time of day and prevailing weather
conditions.
One model is created for each type of risk. In order to turn these
individual models’ scores into actions, they will be combined with rules
representing the best human knowledge on border risk assessment. Some
of these rules will help govern how “tightly” vehicles are selected for
inspection (i.e., what risk scores trigger a secondary inspection) and may
be varied by pre-defined knowledge of peak traffic times, or manually
adjusted in response to abnormally heavy traffic in order to avoid
creating a backlog of secondary inspections.
The agency controls approximately 300 crossings, and while many will
show similar patterns of violation, each will have its own individual
profile of what risks are likely to occur and which violations will be
attempted in which ways. Ideally, each crossing point should have its own
model for each risk type, built from local data. Creating and managing
this number of models manually would be labor-intensive, expensive and
impractical. If, however, analytical experts create an automated process
for building and applying the models, it can be efficiently applied to local
data for each crossing, ensuring a “best fit” that embodies national best
practices.
Law enforcement
In law enforcement, trends in suspicious or criminal behavior can be
identified using a variety of information, including aggregated or
incident-level data. For example, a crime analyst might use predictive
analytics to:
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Internal threats
Insider electronic crimes tend to be particularly difficult to detect since
the perpetrator often has a legitimate reason to be accessing, modifying
and manipulating critical and/or sensitive data. Despite these challenges,
most organizations have a substantial amount of data that can be used to
characterize and potentially mitigate an attack by a malicious insider.
This data may include information such as demographics, performance
reviews, past and current project assignments, internal and external
electronic communications and file usage logs.
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When dealing with insider threat or fraud detection, a “bad actor” may
have normal patterns of behavior that are dynamic and complex. In these
situations, the crime can be very difficult to detect because that person’s
behavior may continue to appear legitimate, with only subtle changes
over time. As a result, it is important not only to determine what behavior
people are exhibiting, but also whose behavior differs from or has
recently changed from that of their peer group.
External threats
The same techniques that are applied to analysis of insider threats are
often useful for analysis of external threats. The primary difference
between insider and external threat analysis is data availability. Attacks
coming from external sources rarely provide the type of demographic
data available for insider threat analysis. Data fields, such as age, group
affiliation, location and historical behavior patterns that can be attributed
to an individual or group are much more difficult to obtain when
analyzing external threats.
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Other applications
Some other applications of IBM SPSS predictive analytics in public
safety include:
Conclusion
People rely on your department or agency to look out for their health
and safety. To do this effectively, you must use your staff and other
resources as efficiently as possible. Having accurate information about
past and current conditions is essential. Employing predictive insight
gives you even greater control, enabling your agency to deploy the right
resources to the right place at the right time.
7
About SPSS, an IBM Company
SPSS, an IBM Company, is a leading global provider of predictive
analytics software and solutions. The company’s complete portfolio of
products - data collection, statistics, modeling and deployment - captures
people’s attitudes and opinions, predicts outcomes of future customer
interactions, and then acts on these insights by embedding analytics into
business processes. IBM SPSS solutions address interconnected business
objectives across an entire organization by focusing on the convergence
of analytics, IT architecture and business process. Commercial,
government and academic customers worldwide rely on IBM SPSS
technology as a competitive advantage in attracting, retaining and
growing customers, while reducing fraud and mitigating risk. SPSS was
acquired by IBM in October 2009. For further information, or to reach a
representative, visit www.spss.com.
SPSS is a registered trademark and the other SPSS products named are
trademarks of SPSS Inc., an IBM Company. © 2010 SPSS Inc., an IBM Company.
All Rights Reserved.
IBM and the IBM logo are trademarks of International Business Machines
Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. For a complete list of IBM
trademarks, see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.
Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of
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References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM
intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates.
Any reference in this information to non-IBM Web sites are provided for convenience
only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of those Web sites. The
materials at those Web sites are not part of the materials for this IBM product and use
of those Web sites is at your own risk.
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