Uncertainty-Aware Crime Prediction With Spatial Temporal Multivariate Graph Neural Networks

Crime prediction (CP) plays a pivotal role in urban analytics, contributing significantly to personal safety and societal stability. Unlike conventional time series forecasting, CP faces unique difficulties due to the inherent sparsity of crime incidents, particularly within small spatial regions and limited time windows. This sparsity, coupled with the non-Gaussian distribution of crime data—characterized by an excess of zero events and over-dispersion—presents a critical challenge for the signal processing community. In this regard, we propose a novel framework, Spatial-Temporal Multivariate Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Graph Neural Networks (STMGNN-ZINB), which integrates diffusion and convolutional graph networks to capture spatial, temporal, and multivariate dependencies. By leveraging a Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial distribution, the STMGNN-ZINB effectively models the over-dispersed and zero-heavy nature of crime data, significantly improving both prediction accuracy and confidence interval estimation. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our STMGNN-ZINB outperforms state-of-the-art CP methods, offering a robust tool for crime early warning and explicable insights into urban crime dynamics.