Modeling for Crime Busting

Background:

Your organization, the Intergalactic Crime Modelers (ICM), is investigating a conspiracy to commit a criminal act. The investigators are highly confident they know several members of the conspiracy, but hope to identify the other members and the leaders before they make arrests. The conspirators and the possible suspected conspirators all work for the same company in a large office complex. The company has been growing fast and making a name for itself in developing and marketing computer software for banks and credit card companies. ICM has recently found a small set of messages from a group of 82 workers in the company that they believe will help them find the most likely candidates for the unidentified co‐conspirators and unknown leaders. Since the message traffic is for all the office workers in the company, it is very likely that some (maybe many) of the identified communicators in the message traffic are not involved in the conspiracy. In fact, they are certain that they know some people who are not in the conspiracy. The goal of the modeling effort will be to identify people in the office complex who are the most likely conspirators. A priority list would be ideal so ICM could investigate, place under surveillance, and/or interrogate the most likely candidates. A discriminate line separating conspirators from non‐conspirators would also be helpful to distinctly categorize the people in each group. It would also be helpful to the DA’s office if the model nominated the conspiracy leaders.

Before the data of the current case are given to your crime modeling team, your supervisor gives you the following scenario (called Investigation EZ) that she worked on a few years ago in another city. Even though she is very proud of her work on the EZ case, she says it is just a very small, simple example, but it may help you understand your task.