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Improving the Robustness and Accuracy of Crime Prediction with the Self-Exciting Point Process Through Isotropic Triggering

Rosser, G; Cheng, T; (2016) Improving the Robustness and Accuracy of Crime Prediction with the Self-Exciting Point Process Through Isotropic Triggering. Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy pp. 1-21. 10.1007/s12061-016-9198-y. Green open access

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Abstract

The self-exciting point process (SEPP) is a model of the spread of crime in space and time, incorporating background and triggering processes. It shows promising predictive performance and forms the basis of a popular commercial software package, however few detailed case studies describing the application of the SEPP to crime data exist in the scientific literature. Using open crime data from the City of Chicago, USA, we apply the SEPP to crime prediction of assaults and burglaries in nine distinct geographical regions of the city. The results indicate that the algorithm is not robust to certain features of the data, generating unrealistic triggering functions in various cases. A simulation study is used to demonstrate that this outcome is associated with a reduction in predictive accuracy. Analysing the second-order spatial properties of the data demonstrates that the failures in the algorithm are correlated with anisotropy. A modified version of the SEPP model is developed in which triggering is non-directional. We show that this provides improved robustness, both in terms of the triggering structure and the predictive accuracy.

Type: Article
Title: Improving the Robustness and Accuracy of Crime Prediction with the Self-Exciting Point Process Through Isotropic Triggering
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s12061-016-9198-y
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12061-016-9198-y
Language: English
Additional information: Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords: Crime, Prediction, Policing, Model robustness, Self-excitation, Point process
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Civil, Environ and Geomatic Eng
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1509528
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