Pattern Tracer

Pattern Tracer Telephone Call Analysis (TCA) is a fast and effective analytical tool specifically designed to find patterns in telephone billing data. It replaces hours of intensive manual inspection with a reliable automated solution.

Integrated into Analyst’s Notebook, Pattern Tracer TCA quickly finds repeating call patterns in telephone billing data and displays them using network and timeline charts.

The close integration with Analyst’s Notebook makes Pattern Tracer TCA both familiar and easy to use, and extends the analytical functionality available within Analyst's Notebook.

Pattern Tracer TCA helps the analyst to:

• Maximise the value of even a single phone billing by identifying the most likely targets from the patterns of calls.
• Identify possible chains of communication within a group.
• Highlight the existence of unknown players or communication channels.
• Predict future incidents by reliably finding all previous instances.
• Prioritise requests for more data and prioritise tasking other investigative resources.

Pattern Tracer TCA is a fast and effective solution for finding patterns in your investigative data. Because of the huge time savings over other techniques, pattern identification can be applied to more than just the "most important" cases.

Establishing Patterns in Telephone Data

Looking at a link chart of raw phone data, it clearly illustrates how a temporal cluster – shown in blue – is something different from a standard cluster. An ordinary link chart would not identify these four connections as all being linked. The cluster is only revealed by Pattern Tracer TCA's algorithmic analysis. The temporal cluster doesn't specifically tell you which are the co-occurring calls (that is, which connections' calls are found together). This level of detail is provided by patterns. The cluster may be broken down into several distinct patterns of repeated calls which overlap in terms of connections. The cluster is a schematic view, comprising several overlaid patterns, which gives a high-level view of the structure of connections.

Clusters and Patterns

A pattern can be defined as a frequently occurring subset of a cluster:

In the cluster above, we know that there is co-occurrence between calls on different connections within the cluster, but we can't tell exactly which connections are found with which others. Patterns reveal this finer detail.

This is the same cluster showing the patterns which comprise it. There are five different patterns in the cluster. By viewing the patterns, we can now tell which specific groups of connections repeatedly co-occur, as each unique pattern of co-occurrence is labelled individually.

Click here to request further information on this product.