Analysis of world terror networks from the reduced Google matrix of Wikipedia

Abstract

We apply the reduced Google matrix method to analyse interactions between 95 terrorist groups and determine their relationships and influence on 64 world countries. This is done on the basis of the Google matrix of the English Wikipedia (2017) composed of 5416537 articles which accumulate a great part of global human knowledge. The reduced Google matrix takes into account the direct and hidden links between a selection of 159 nodes (articles) appearing due to all paths of a random surfer moving over the whole network. As a result we obtain the network structure of terrorist groups and their relations with selected countries. Using the sensitivity of PageRank to a weight variation of specific links we determine the geopolitical sensitivity and influence of specific terrorist groups on world countries. We argue that this approach can find useful application for more extensive and detailed data bases analysis.