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Article · Applied Sciences · November 20, 2020

Spatiotemporal Analysis of Web News Archives for Crime Prediction

Areeba Umair, Muhammad Shahzad Sarfraz, Muhammad Imran Ahmad, Usman Habib, Muhammad Habib Ullah, Manuel Mazzara

Manuel Mazzara
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Abstract

In today’s world, security is the most prominent aspect which has been given higher priority. Despite the rapid growth and usage of digital devices, lucrative measurement of crimes in under-developing countries is still challenging. In this work, unstructural crime data (900 records) from the news archives of the previous eight years were extracted to predict the behavior of criminals’ networks and transform it into useful information using natural language processing (NLP). To estimate the next move of criminals in Pakistan, we performed hotspot-based spatial analysis. Later, this information is fed to two different classifiers for possible identification and prediction. We achieved the maximum accuracy of 92% using K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and 62% using the Random Forest algorithm. In terms of crimes, the results showed that the most prevalent crime events are robberies. Thus, the usage of digital information archives, spatial analysis, and machine learning techniques can open new ways of handling a peaceful and sustainable society in eradicating crimes for countries having paucity of financial resources.

Crime Patterns and InterventionsText and Document Classification TechnologiesData Mining and Machine Learning Applicationscrime predictionspatio-temporal analysishot spot analysis

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