1,151 research outputs found
Spatio-Temporal Low Count Processes with Application to Violent Crime Events
There is significant interest in being able to predict where crimes will
happen, for example to aid in the efficient tasking of police and other
protective measures. We aim to model both the temporal and spatial dependencies
often exhibited by violent crimes in order to make such predictions. The
temporal variation of crimes typically follows patterns familiar in time series
analysis, but the spatial patterns are irregular and do not vary smoothly
across the area. Instead we find that spatially disjoint regions exhibit
correlated crime patterns. It is this indeterminate inter-region correlation
structure along with the low-count, discrete nature of counts of serious crimes
that motivates our proposed forecasting tool. In particular, we propose to
model the crime counts in each region using an integer-valued first order
autoregressive process. We take a Bayesian nonparametric approach to flexibly
discover a clustering of these region-specific time series. We then describe
how to account for covariates within this framework. Both approaches adjust for
seasonality. We demonstrate our approach through an analysis of weekly reported
violent crimes in Washington, D.C. between 2001-2008. Our forecasts outperform
standard methods while additionally providing useful tools such as prediction
intervals
CASTNet: Community-Attentive Spatio-Temporal Networks for Opioid Overdose Forecasting
Opioid overdose is a growing public health crisis in the United States. This
crisis, recognized as "opioid epidemic," has widespread societal consequences
including the degradation of health, and the increase in crime rates and family
problems. To improve the overdose surveillance and to identify the areas in
need of prevention effort, in this work, we focus on forecasting opioid
overdose using real-time crime dynamics. Previous work identified various types
of links between opioid use and criminal activities, such as financial motives
and common causes. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel
spatio-temporal predictive model for opioid overdose forecasting by leveraging
the spatio-temporal patterns of crime incidents. Our proposed model
incorporates multi-head attentional networks to learn different representation
subspaces of features. Such deep learning architecture, called
"community-attentive" networks, allows the prediction of a given location to be
optimized by a mixture of groups (i.e., communities) of regions. In addition,
our proposed model allows for interpreting what features, from what
communities, have more contributions to predicting local incidents as well as
how these communities are captured through forecasting. Our results on two
real-world overdose datasets indicate that our model achieves superior
forecasting performance and provides meaningful interpretations in terms of
spatio-temporal relationships between the dynamics of crime and that of opioid
overdose.Comment: Accepted as conference paper at ECML-PKDD 201
Bad moon on the rise? Lunar cycles and incidents of crime
Popular cultures in Western societies have long espoused the notion that phases of the moon influence human behavior. In particular, there is a common belief the full moon increases incidents of aberrant, deviant, and criminal behavior. Using police, astronomical, and weather data from a major southwestern American city, this study assessed whether lunar cycles related with rates of reported crime. The findings fail to support popular lore, which has suggested that lunar phase influenced the volume of crime reported to the police. Future research directions examining qualitative rather than quantitative aspects of this problem may yield further inform the understanding of whether lunar cycles appreciably influence demands for policing services
Predicting Cyber Events by Leveraging Hacker Sentiment
Recent high-profile cyber attacks exemplify why organizations need better
cyber defenses. Cyber threats are hard to accurately predict because attackers
usually try to mask their traces. However, they often discuss exploits and
techniques on hacking forums. The community behavior of the hackers may provide
insights into groups' collective malicious activity. We propose a novel
approach to predict cyber events using sentiment analysis. We test our approach
using cyber attack data from 2 major business organizations. We consider 3
types of events: malicious software installation, malicious destination visits,
and malicious emails that surpassed the target organizations' defenses. We
construct predictive signals by applying sentiment analysis on hacker forum
posts to better understand hacker behavior. We analyze over 400K posts
generated between January 2016 and January 2018 on over 100 hacking forums both
on surface and Dark Web. We find that some forums have significantly more
predictive power than others. Sentiment-based models that leverage specific
forums can outperform state-of-the-art deep learning and time-series models on
forecasting cyber attacks weeks ahead of the events
Scalable high-resolution forecasting of sparse spatiotemporal events with kernel methods: a winning solution to the NIJ "Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge"
We propose a generic spatiotemporal event forecasting method, which we developed for the National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ) RealTime Crime Forecasting Challenge (National Institute of Justice, 2017). Our method is a spatiotemporal forecasting model combining scalable randomized Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) methods for approximating Gaussian processes with autoregressive smoothing kernels in a regularized supervised learning framework. While the smoothing kernels capture the two main approaches in current use in the field of crime forecasting, kernel density estimation (KDE) and self-exciting point process (SEPP) models, the RKHS component of the model can be understood as an approximation to the popular log-Gaussian Cox Process model. For inference, we discretize the spatiotemporal point pattern and learn a log-intensity function using the Poisson likelihood and highly efficient gradientbased optimization methods. Model hyperparameters including quality of RKHS approximation, spatial and temporal kernel lengthscales, number of autoregressive lags, bandwidths for smoothing kernels, as well as cell shape, size, and rotation, were learned using crossvalidation. Resulting predictions significantly exceeded baseline KDE estimates and SEPP models for sparse events
The Crime Rate and the Condition of the Labor Market: A Vector Autoregressive Model
Few empirical studies of the economics of crime have doubted the deterrent effects of the legal sanctions on crime. Those studies, however, have not established a definitive understanding of the effects of labor market conditions on crime. In this paper, we examine the impact of labor market conditions, represented by either male civilian unemployment or labor force participation rates, on seven major categories of crime, using the quarterly crime-rate data for the United States. Based on an analysis of the reported crime rates for murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft during the period from the first quarter of 1970 through the fourth quarter of 1983, we reject the null hypothesis that labor market conditions have no effects on the crime rate. Rather, we find that the male civilian unemployment rates, especially the rate for those twenty-five years old and over, are strongly and positively associated with most of the crime rates studied. The male civilian labor force participation rates are also found to be related to the crime rates considered here. Youth labor force participation rates for both whites and non-whites, sixteen to nineteen years old, are more strongly associated with the examined crime rates than are the labor force participation rates for males, twenty years old and over.
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