It's all X k D f . X k ; t / C » . t /; and it's that easy!

"Lies, damned lies and statistics", Benjamin Disraeli

Law enforcement,  marketers, social scientists, all use predictive behavioral models in order to understand future behaviors for both individuals and groups.

And if you want a cure for insomnia there are plenty of papers out there that I can recommend that will surely put you to sleep.

All kidding aside Howard D. Teten was the former head of the FBI profiling division. Teten based his pioneering work on the models established by Dr. Paul Kirk, Dr. Hans Gross and Dr. James Brussel.

When Howard Teten had joined the FBI in 1962 a criminal profile division did not exist. It wasn't untl 1973 that Howard Teten and Quantico Behavioral Science Unit  instructor Patrick J. Mullany were able to test their theories in the field.

When a  a seven-year-old girl was kidnapped Teten and Mullany were able to use their profile model to track down the kidnapper, David Meirhofer.

Today criminal profiling is common but during one of the earliest cases of profiling, the arrest of "The Mad Bomber"  George Metesky in 1957, it must have seemed like something straight out of a Sherlock Holmes novel.

George Metesky went on a sixteen year bombing spree in New York City starting 1940. Metesky eluded police for almost two decades despite sending them taunting letters in the mail.

Eventually Dr. James Brussel was called into the NY police department to help. Dr. Brussel studied "The Mad Bomber" letters and accurately predicted the suspect would be in his late forties or early fifties, was a non-native English speaker due to his lack of use of slang in the letters, was a practicing Catholic, probably from eastern Europe, and lived with an older unmarried woman that was either his sister or mother.

Dr. Brussel would work with the NYPD from 1957 to 1972 and Howard Teten would work with the FBI until 1986.

Even though compiling statistical data can be daunting, sorting through reams of information is laborious, and making sense of material is agonizing in the end it is a powerful tool.

Without accurate, reliable information you cannot make accurate decisions. 

For more interesting article on the subject check out:

1. "Towards an environment-sociologic model for prediction of environmental behaviors and investigation of strategic policy alternative" by Kurosh Rezaei Moghaddam and Mahsa Fatemi 

2. Interview of Former Special Agent of the FBI  Howard D. Teten (1962-1986) by Stanley Pimentel

3. International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction official website.