ABSTRACT
One may think that since terrorism is a highly complex social phenomenon that does not abide by social laws, it cannot be predicted through the use of quantitative models. A similar statement can be also found in the following claim: “acts of terrorism cannot be summarized by mathematical formulas”. Systems described through mathematical concepts and language—these systems often refer to the so-called mathematical models—have a long tradition in the study of political conflict. Lichbach identified more than 200 scholarly works which use mathematical models to describe phenomena such as guerrilla wars and insurrections. Analogously, characteristics of individual terrorist attack such as their geolocalization, time, or number of deaths cannot be exactly known before they occur due to the inherent stochastic nature of terrorist events. In a related research area, Cederman and his colleagues carried out a meta-analysis that reviews predictive models applied to conflict events.
