Mining large-scale human mobility data for long-term crime prediction

Traditional crime prediction models based on census data are limited, as they fail to capture the complexity and dynamics of human activity. With the rise of ubiquitous computing, there is the opportunity to improve such models with data that make for better proxies of human presence in cities. In this paper, we leverage large human mobility data to craft an extensive set of features for crime prediction, as informed by theories in criminology and urban studies. We employ averaging and boosting ensemble techniques from machine learning, to investigate their power in predicting yearly counts for different types of crimes occurring in New York City at census tract level. Our study shows that spatial and spatio-temporal features derived from Foursquare venues and checkins, subway rides, and taxi rides, improve the baseline models relying on census and POI data. The proposed models achieve absolute R^2 metrics of up to 65% (on a geographical out-of-sample test set) and up to 89% (on a temporal out-of-sample test set). This proves that, next to the residential population of an area, the ambient population there is strongly predictive of the area's crime levels. We deep-dive into the main crime categories, and find that the predictive gain of the human dynamics features varies across crime types: such features bring the biggest boost in case of grand larcenies, whereas assaults are already well predicted by the census features. Furthermore, we identify and discuss top predictive features for the main crime categories. These results offer valuable insights for those responsible for urban policy or law enforcement

Geo-Adaptive Deep Spatio-Temporal predictive modeling for human mobility

Deep learning approaches for spatio-temporal prediction problems such as crowd-flow prediction assumes data to be of fixed and regular shaped tensor and face challenges of handling irregular, sparse data tensor. This poses limitations in use-case scenarios such as predicting visit counts of individuals' for a given spatial area at a particular temporal resolution using raster/image format representation of the geographical region, since the movement patterns of an individual can be largely restricted and localized to a certain part of the raster. Additionally, current deep-learning approaches for solving such problem doesn't account for the geographical awareness of a region while modelling the spatio-temporal movement patterns of an individual. To address these limitations, there is a need to develop a novel strategy and modeling approach that can handle both sparse, irregular data while incorporating geo-awareness in the model. In this paper, we make use of quadtree as the data structure for representing the image and introduce a novel geo-aware enabled deep learning layer, GA-ConvLSTM that performs the convolution operation based on a novel geo-aware module based on quadtree data structure for incorporating spatial dependencies while maintaining the recurrent mechanism for accounting for temporal dependencies. We present this approach in the context of the problem of predicting spatial behaviors of an individual (e.g., frequent visits to specific locations) through deep-learning based predictive model, GADST-Predict. Experimental results on two GPS based trace data shows that the proposed method is effective in handling frequency visits over different use-cases with considerable high accuracy