Target vehicle identification for border safety with modified mutual information

ABSTRACT

In recent years border security has been identified as a critical part of homeland security. The Department of Homeland Security monitors vehicles entering and leaving the country at land borders. Some vehicles are targeted to search for drugs and other contraband. Customs and Border Protection agents believe that vehicles involved in illegal activity operate in groups. If the criminal links of one vehicle are known then their border crossing patterns can be used to identify other partner vehicles. We perform this association analysis by using mutual information (MI) to identify pairs of vehicles that are potentially involved in criminal activity. Domain experts also suggest that criminal vehicles may cross at certain times of the day to evade inspection. We propose to modify the MI formulation to include this heuristic by using cross-jurisdictional criminal data from border-area jurisdictions.

REFERENCES

• 1: National Strategy for Homeland Security, Office of Homeland Security, 2002.
• 2: Fano, R. M. (1961) Transmission of Information. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1961.
• 3: Siddharth Kaza , Yuan Wang , Hsinchun Chen, Target vehicle identification for border safety with modified mutual information, Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government research, May 21-24, 2006, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/1146598.1146726]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.8 Database applications
          Subjects: Data mining

General Terms:
Algorithms, Security

Keywords:
homeland security, intelligence and security informatics, mutual information