Making the connection between seemingly unrelated pieces of information forms the backbone of any Intelligence Analysis effort. The successful analyst is able to:
Sift through the vast amount of data.
Identify persons and events of interest.
Detect and correlate events into a coherent picture of what is happening.
Develop methods for drawing actionable conclusions.
In accomplishing this task, the challenges faced include:
Extracting meaningful information from data is tedious.
Information content or certainty may change during analysis.
An analyst's hypothesis must be supported by cogent, explicit arguments.
Analysts must show probable cause during the information access process.
Human cognition has many deficiencies, including confirmation bias, poor handling of uncertainty, and insufficient consideration of prior probabilities.
Different analysts may come to different conclusions from the same data.
