Ace the 2026 ACFE CFE Investigations Exam – Unleash Your Inner Fraud Fighter!

Link analysis is particularly effective in identifying indirect relationships because it visualizes the connections and interactions between entities within a dataset. By employing nodes to represent entities (such as individuals or organizations) and links to show relationships or transactions between them, link analysis allows investigators to see not only direct relationships but also how these entities are connected through intermediaries or chains of connections.

This method can uncover hidden patterns and associations that may not be immediately obvious, making it a powerful tool in fraud investigations. For example, it can show how individuals are connected through previous transactions or shared associations, helping to identify potential fraud schemes that involve several parties and indirect relationships that could otherwise go unnoticed.

Other data analysis tools, while useful, do not focus on the detection of indirect relationships in the same way. Geospatial analysis typically examines data based on geographic locations, tree maps visually represent hierarchical data, and word maps emphasize text data and frequency, none of which are primarily designed to reveal complex indirect relationships among diverse entities.