U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Optimization of criminal hotspots based on underlying crime controlling factors using geospatial discriminative pattern

NCJ Number
306189
Author(s)
Dawei Wang ; Wei Ding ; Tomasz Stepinski; Josue Salazar ; Henry Lo ; Melissa Morabito
Date Published
2012
Length
10 pages
Annotation

Since existing methods usually identify hotspots based on an arbitrary user-defined threshold with respect to the number of a target crime without considering underlying controlling factors, the current study introduces a new data mining model – Hotspots Optimization Tool (HOT) – to identify and optimize crime hotspots.

Abstract

The key component of HOT, Geospatial Discriminative Patterns (GDPatterns), which capture the difference between two classes in spatial dataset, is used in crime hotspot analysis. Using a real-world dataset of a northeastern city in the United States, the authors demonstrate that the HOT model is a useful tool in optimizing crime hotspots, and it is also capable of visualizing criminal controlling factors which will help domain scientists further understanding the underlying reasons of criminal activities. (Published abstract provided)