Double cross: geographic profiling of V-2 impact sites

Abstract

than a thousand V-2 rockets struck Great Britain, causing 2,754 deaths and 6,523 injuries.. Unlike the V-1, the V-2 could not be shot down, and M.I.5 responded with an ingenious scheme to mislead the Germans about the impact sites so they would shorten the range, missing Westminster and the docks. This is widely regarded as a success, with claims that the M.P.I. moved eastwards by two miles a week, ending outside London and saving 1,300 lives. Here, we use geographic profiling-a statistical technique originally developed to prioritise large lists of suspects in cases of serial crime-to show that this deception had little or no effect. Our results suggest rockets aimed at a single target would form clusters of 30 km radius, swamping the claimed movement. Our study shows how geographic profiling may be applied to diverse data sets beyond criminology and epidemiology.

Tracing outliers in the dataset of Drosophila suzukii records with the Isolation Forest method

“…The geoprofiles does not provide exactly the center of origin of the event, but rather provide areas at different priority on the map with a variable probability density [31,32]. After its first use in criminoloy, PGP was applied to biological problems such as the targeting of an infectious disease [27], the prediction of nest locations of bumble bees [39], animal foraging [21,30], sharks hunting patterns [24] and even the distribution pattern of V2 bombing [3]. More recently, PGP was used to guess the source of an invasion by alien organisms using the positions of their current populations [8,28,38].…”

Steven Clive Le Comber (19 June 1966–14 September 2019)

“…These wide-ranging and varied applications really became the keystone of Steve's research, but his ingenuity and an eye for an interesting story meant that often, these cases highlighted his ability to think outside the box. He used the same underlying mathematics in some surprising applicationsfrom a Second World War British Secret Service operation designed to deceive the Germans about the accuracy of the V-2 rocket bombardment on London (Aygin et al, 2019), to helping to identify Banksy (Hauge et al, 2016) or understanding the origins of London's ring-necked parakeets (Heald et al, 2019).…”