• Background
• Problem
• Solution base
• Method
• About the Data
• Implementation

Background

Considering an anti-money laundering (#AML) and crime analysis case: with two suspects; A and C.

• person A is a suspected politician.
• person C is a known terrorist leader.

Any direct meeting or transaction - financial or otherwise between them would be flagged by the authorities, and heavily probed. Nonetheless, to protect their interests, A and C may choose never to transact directly, but instead conduct dealings through safe, respected and unlabeled financial person and authorities; B and D.

Problem

Find a way to discover the transitive relationship between politician Mr A and criminal Mr C through their meetings with all possible intermediaries.

Solution Base

The Six degrees of seperation would stand as a perfect pointer to pick up on the transaction. The method shows how any two element(source and target) can be connected - if possible, within just six steps.

Method

I frame this as a search problem

• The states being the different people iterated over
• The intial state is defined by the first person(source)
• The goal is the target suspect

Using BFS(breadth-first-search), the shortest path(connection) from one suspect to another can be found

The main function is implemented as a test/driver

• loads the data from directory into memory
• prompts the user to type in the two names(source & target)

The person_id_for_name function

• retrieves the id for any person

The shortest_path function,

• finds and returns the shortest path link betweent the source and the target

The status variable - flags pair transactions and link-ups as suspicious " * "

About the Data

The data provided is formulated:

• people.csv - the suspects of the case.
• places.csv - points where individuals may have converged.
• appearances.csv - shows the various locations visited by various pairs of people.

Implementation

Loading data...
Data loaded.
Name: Bala Bulu Corn
Name: Shurecan Rigg
The suspects are connected 
There are 3 degrees of separation between them.
1: Bala Bulu Corn and Brigitte Bardot were in Fagba.
2: Brigitte Bardot and Ramiro Archain were in Imota  *
3: Ramiro Archain and Shurecan Rigg were in Isheri  *

The util.py was adopted from the CS50 Search project