Crime incidents embedding using restricted Boltzmann machines

We present a new approach for detecting related crime series, by unsupervised learning of the latent feature embeddings from narratives of crime record via the Gaussian-Bernoulli Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). This is a drastically different approach from prior work on crime analysis, which typically considers only time and location and at most category information. After the embedding, related cases are closer to each other in the Euclidean feature space, and the unrelated cases are far apart, which is a good property can enable subsequent analysis such as detection and clustering of related cases. Experiments over several series of related crime incidents hand labeled by the Atlanta Police Department reveal the promise of our embedding methods.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Poisson Matrix Completion

We extend the theory of matrix completion to the case where we make Poisson observations for a subset of entries of a low-rank matrix. We consider the (now) usual matrix recovery formulation through maximum likelihood with proper constraints on the matrix $M$, and establish theoretical upper and lower bounds on the recovery error. Our bounds are nearly optimal up to a factor on the order of $\mathcal{O}(\log(d_1 d_2))$. These bounds are obtained by adapting the arguments used for one-bit matrix completion \cite{davenport20121} (although these two problems are different in nature) and the adaptation requires new techniques exploiting properties of the Poisson likelihood function and tackling the difficulties posed by the locally sub-Gaussian characteristic of the Poisson distribution. Our results highlight a few important distinctions of Poisson matrix completion compared to the prior work in matrix completion including having to impose a minimum signal-to-noise requirement on each observed entry. We also develop an efficient iterative algorithm and demonstrate its good performance in recovering solar flare images.Comment: Submitted to IEEE for publicatio

Dynamic change-point detection using similarity networks

From a sequence of similarity networks, with edges representing certain similarity measures between nodes, we are interested in detecting a change-point which changes the statistical property of the networks. After the change, a subset of anomalous nodes which compares dissimilarly with the normal nodes. We study a simple sequential change detection procedure based on node-wise average similarity measures, and study its theoretical property. Simulation and real-data examples demonstrate such a simply stopping procedure has reasonably good performance. We further discuss the faulty sensor isolation (estimating anomalous nodes) using community detection.Comment: appeared in Asilomar Conference 201