Title
Spatially embedded co-offence prediction using supervised learning
Abstract
Crime reduction and prevention strategies are essential to increase public safety and reduce the crime costs to society. Law enforcement agencies have long realized the importance of analyzing co-offending networks---networks of offenders who have committed crimes together---for this purpose. Although network structure can contribute significantly to co-offence prediction, research in this area is very limited. Here we address this important problem by proposing a framework for co-offence prediction using supervised learning. Considering the available information about offenders, we introduce social, geographic, geo-social and similarity feature sets which are used for classifying potential negative and positive pairs of offenders. Similar to other social networks, co-offending networks also suffer from a highly skewed distribution of positive and negative pairs. To address the class imbalance problem, we identify three types of criminal cooperation opportunities which help to reduce the class imbalance ratio significantly, while keeping half of the co-offences. The proposed framework is evaluated on a large crime dataset for the Province of British Columbia, Canada. Our experimental evaluation of four different feature sets show that the novel geo-social features are the best predictors. Overall, we experimentally show the high effectiveness of the proposed co-offence prediction framework. We believe that our framework will not only allow law enforcement agencies to improve their crime reduction and prevention strategies, but also offers new criminological insights into criminal link formation between offenders.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2623330.2623353
KDD
Keywords
Field
DocType
co-offence prediction,data mining,link prediction,social network
Data mining,Social network,Computer science,Supervised learning,Artificial intelligence,Law enforcement,Machine learning,Network structure
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.49
12
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mohammad A. Tayebi1507.59
Martin Ester29391858.89
Uwe Glässer345659.36
Patricia L. Brantingham48518.76