Picture courtesy of www.cnn.com

Terrorism is open to different interpretation. Depending on who you ask, the responses you get would be different. Most will probably say it is a negative foreign impact on lives and properties. However, recent incidents like in the case of Las Vegas shootings on October 1, 2017, and that of Texas church shootings a month after tells a different story. Could such be classified as terrorist attacks based on the nationality of the perpetrators? Is the US imploding from inside out or outside in? Can we tell beforehand the trend of such occurrences? These questions are begging answers, and form the core of my analysis.

This work is based on a real-life dataset from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) maintained by the University of Maryland. Its purpose is to gain insights into the current state of terrorism in the US, and possibly classifying if attacker groups are either domestic or foreign and also making predictions of future unrewarded risks. I foresee this analysis valuable to anyone that cares about the safety of lives and properties.

The analysis will be progressively reviewed based on feedback from industry experts and periodic updates of the GTD. This work is part of my submission as a capstone project at Springboard Data Science Career Track Fellowship Program.

• The original dataset is too large, and cannot be uploaded on here. It can be downloaded from GTD's website after filling out a form and providing personal information. However, i have an abridged version of the spreadsheet on here restricted to cases in the USA.
• My approach to this analysis can be applied to the full dataset and/or other countries with minor tweaks. I will be making progressive updates on this analysis and model based on feedback from industry experts and University of Maryland GTD data owners.
• I propose more questions being asked of this data as analysis progress.