An Integrated Model for Crime Prediction Using Temporal and Spatial Factors

Given its importance, crime prediction has attracted a lot of attention in the literature, and several methods have been proposed to discover different aspects of characteristics for crime prediction. In this paper, we propose a Clustered Continuous Conditional Random Field (Clustered-CCRF) model which is able to effectively exploit both spatial and temporal factors for crime prediction in an integrated way. In particular, we observe that the crime number at one specific area is not only conditioned on its own historical records but also has high correlation to crime records from similar areas. Therefore, we propose two factors: an auto-regressed temporal correlation and a feature-based inter-area spatial correlation, to measure such patterns for crime prediction. Further, we present a tree-structured clustering algorithm to discover high similar areas based on spatial characteristics to improve the performance of our proposed model. Experiments on real-world crime dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods.