Learning Opportunistic Adversarial Model on Global Wildlife Trade

Abstract:

Global illegal wildlife trade threatens biodiversity and acts as a potential crisis of invasive species and disease spread. Despite a wide range of national and international policies and regulations designed to stop illegal wildlife trade, high profit margins and increasing demand drive a vigorous global illicit trade network. In this paper, we aim to build an adversarial model to predict the future wildlife trade based on the historical trade data. We hypothesize that the majority of illegal wildlife trade is opportunistic crime, which is highly correlated to legal wildlife trade. We can therefore leverage the abundant legal wildlife trade data to forecast the future wildlife trade, where a fixed fraction of trade volume will reflect the opportunistic wildlife trade volume. To learn a legal wildlife trade model, we propose to use graph neural networks and meta-learning to handle the network and species dependencies, respectively. Lastly, we suggest to incorporate agent-based models on top of our model to study the evolution from opportunistic to more organized illegal wildlife trade behavior.