Data Visualization

Attack Types in Regions of the World

About This Visualization

This Sankey Diagram shows the different terrorism attack types used in different regions of the world. We see that overall, there are the most incidents in the Middle East & North Africa and South Asia regions, and that bombings/explosions and armed assaults have been the most common types of attacks. Beyond this, there are not any especially clear patterns that emerge.

I nevertheless wanted to include this visualization on my website for a few reasons: First, Sankey networks can be powerful for enabling patterns to emerge visually. Second, I find them to be aesthetically appealing. Finally, it is an example of a visualiztion I have created with R's NetworkD3 library, which is one of several fabulous libraries that enables non-D3 experts to create beautiful D3 visualizations.

References

You can find the code I used to create this visualization here. Here are links to the node data and edge data. The full Global Terrorism Database is posted -- along with many visualizations by other people -- on Kaggle.