Fuzzy Techniques Explain Empirical Power Law Governing Wars and Terrorist Attacks

Authors

Hung T. Nguyen, New Mexico State University - Main CampusFollow
Kittawit Autchariyapanitkul, Maejo UniversityFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

4-2017

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-16-103a

To appear in Proceedings of the Joint 17th Congress of International Fuzzy Systems Association and 9th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems, Otsu, Japan, June 27-30, 2017.

Abstract

The empirical distribution of the number of casualties in wars and terrorist attacks follows a power law with exponent 2.5. So far, there has not been a convincing explanation for this empirical fact. In this paper, we show that by using fuzzy techniques, we can explain this exponent. Interesting, we can also get a similar explanation if we use probabilistic techniques. The fact that two different techniques lead to the same explanation makes us reasonably confident that this explanation is correct.