Researcher Proposes Statistical Method to Enhance Airport Secondary Security Screenings University of Texas at Arlington (02/03/09)
as it appeared in the February 9, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews.
University of Texas at Austin computational biologist William H. Press says he has developed a better way to select people for secondary security screenings at airports. Press calls the method square root bias sampling, and says it statistically chooses people for extra screening more efficiently and fairly. In security screenings at airports, individuals are taken aside for more thorough screening based on their "prior probability," which could include their ethnic profile. For example, the statistical information used might consider someone from the profiled group, Group P, as 16 times more likely to be a terrorist than someone from the average group, Group A. With square root bias sampling, individuals in Group P would be screened only four times more often then people in Group A, as four is the square root of 16. Fewer people from Group P would face repeated screenings, but they would still be screened more than the average person. The current approach screens the same people over again, which is not the best way to use security resources, Press says. View Full Article
