Ranking Terrorist Nodes of 26 / 11 Mumbai Attack using Analytical Hierarchy Process with Social Network Analysis

26/11 Mumbai attack is one of the major terrorist attack in India, executed on November 26, 2008. For analyzing such terrorist attacks, Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the most effective technique, recognized worldwide. Various centrality measures of SNA have capability to find the key players/leaders and obtain a rank ordering of nodes in such networks. But, most of the times, each of these individual measures result in identifying different key players and rank ordering. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) can be combined with existing SNA measures in order to find the overall ranking of nodes based bjective judgements. In this paper, 26/11 Mumbai terrorist network is analyzed using AHP with existing SNA centrality measures as decision criteria, to discover the overall ranking of all 13 terrorists involved in the attack and to find the key players/leaders among them. Further, sensitivity analysis is discussed to deal with changes in subjective judgements. The experimental results show that when AHP is combined with SNA centrality measures, results in more promising ranking of nodes in terrorist networks than only centrality is considered.

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