Crime Pattern Detection Using Data Mining: Snath1@Fau - Edu
Crime Pattern Detection Using Data Mining: Snath1@Fau - Edu
Crime Pattern Detection Using Data Mining: Snath1@Fau - Edu
1. Introduction
Historically solving crimes has been the prerogative of the
criminal justice and law enforcement specialists. With the
increasing use of the computerized systems to track
crimes, computer data analysts have started helping the
law enforcement officers and detectives to speed up the
process of solving crimes. Here we will take an inter-
disciplinary approach between computer science and
criminal justice to develop a data mining paradigm that
can help solve crimes faster. More specifically, we will
use clustering based models to help in identification of Fig 1 Geo-spatial plot of crimes, each red dot
crime patterns[1]. represents a crime incident.
We will discuss some terminology that is used in criminal
justice and police departments and compare and contrast
them relative to data mining systems. Suspect refers to the 2. Crime Reporting Systems
person that is believed to have committed the crime. The
suspect may be identified or unidentified. The suspect is The data for crime often presents an interesting
not a convict until proved guilty. The victim is the person dilemma. While some data is kept confidential, some
who is the target of the crime. Most of the time the victim becomes public information. Data about the prisoners can
We looked at the use of data mining for identifying [4] Whitepaper, Oracles Integration Hub For
crime patterns crime pattern using the clustering Justice And Public Safety, Oracle Corp. 2004, available
techniques. Our contribution here was to formulate crime at:
pattern detection as machine learning task and to thereby http://www.oracle.com/industries/government/Integration
use data mining to support police detectives in solving Hub_Justice.pdf
crimes. We identified the significant attributes; using
expert based semi-supervised learning method and
developed the scheme for weighting the significant
attributes. Our modeling technique was able to identify
the crime patterns from a large number of crimes making
the job for crime detectives easier.
Some of the limitations of our study includes that
crime pattern analysis can only help the detective, not
replace them. Also data mining is sensitive to quality of
input data that may be inaccurate, have missing
information, be data entry error prone etc. Also mapping
real data to data mining attributes is not always an easy
task and often requires skilled data miner and crime data
analyst with good domain knowledge. They need to work
closely with a detective in the initial phases.
As a future extension of this study we will create
models for predicting the crime hot-spots [3] that will
help in the deployment of police at most likely places of
crime for any given window of time, to allow most
effective utilization of police resources. We also plan to
look into developing social link networks to link
criminals, suspects, gangs and study their
interrelationships. Additionally the ability to search
suspect description in regional, FBI databases [4], to
traffic violation databases from different states etc. to aid
the crime pattern detection or more specifically counter