Prediction of crime hot spots using spatiotemporal ordinary kriging

Abstract

Prediction can play a very important role in many types of domains, including the criminal justice system. Even a little information can be gained from proper police assignments, which can increase the efficiency of the crime patrolling system. Citizens can also be aware and alert for possible future criminal incidents. This was identified previously, but the proposed solutions use many complex features, which are difficult to collect, especially for developing and underdeveloped countries, and the maximum accuracy obtained to date using simple features is around 66%. Few of these countries have even started collecting such criminal records in digital format. Thus, there is a need to use simple and minimal required features for prediction and to improve prediction accuracy. In the proposed work, a spatiotemporal ordinary kriging model is used. This method uses not only minimal features such as location, time and crime type, but also their correlation to predict future crime locations, which helps to increase accuracy. Past crime hot spot locations are used to predict future possible crime locations. To address this, the Philadelphia dataset is used to extract features such as latitude, longitude, crime type and time of incident, and prediction can be given for every 0.36 square km per day. The city area is divided into grids of 600 × 600 m. According to the evaluation results, the average sensitivity and specificity obtained for these experiments is 90.52 and 88.63%, respectively. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.