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Detecting and monitoring geographical changes in crime rates

 

Recently, a lot of efforts have been given to the study of detecting “hot spots” or geographic clusters around location points, termed as spatial point pattern analysis. Most of them rely upon methods examining observation retrospectively, that is, in a sense statistical tests are used to determine the likelihood of the null hypothesis of no spatial clusters around point locations. This type of approach is widely adopted in spatial analysis of point data, including crime analysis. For instance, a very common practice in crime cluster detection is using Kernel Density Estimation to generate point density maps. The following maps are the distribution of three types of crime events in Buffalo, NY, the year of 1996, namely, arson, burglary, and drug. From these kinds of maps, we can only form a very general picture of the whereabouts of the occurrences of crime. Besides, they are static and do not take into account the temporal dimension.

 

Arson (Point Location)

Arson (Point Density)

 

 

Burglary (Point Location)

Burglary (Point Density)

 

 

Drug (Point Location)

Drug (Point Density)

 

As we all know, an important element of effective law enforcement and community policing efforts is the quick identification of emergent “hot spots” of increasing criminal activity. Similarly, it’s of interest to identify areas of declining activity in a timely manner, to aid in the development of appropriate and effective responses. Thus, a major objective of this project is to develop statistical methods and monitoring models for the quick detection of emerging and declining geographic clusters of criminal activity. Therefore, it is very important to develop methods for the quick identification of the change of geographic patterns of criminal activity. Retrospective methods are not quite useful for this purpose and new methods are in need. Farrington and Beale (1998) provide a summary of the motivation for prospective, opposed to retrospective, detection of disease outbreaks. The same argument applies to this study.

 

1. Statistical Model

 

(1) Nearest neighbor statistic

The nearest neighbor statistic is commonly used in spatial pattern analysis because of its simplicity. It compares the observed mean of the distance between points and their nearest neighbors with the expected distance between them in a random distribution (Clark and Evans, 1954).  Therefore, the nearest statistic, R, is the ratio of the observed to the expected distance:

                                                         (1)

where  is the observed distance and is the observed distance. R ranges from 0 to 2.149. Values less than 1 indicate clustering while 0 means all the points is at a single location and 2.149 means that points are maximally disperse in space. We can standardize quantity for a statistical test, z-score, given by:

                                                   (2)

where is the standard deviation of the mean distance in a random distribution. Under CRS, z has approximately a standard normal distribution. An observed z-score that is less than the critical value of z would lead to the rejection of the null hypothesis, favoring the existence of significant clustering.

 

(2) Cumulative sum analysis

Cumulative sum analysis is commonly used in industrial process control to monitor product quality (Wetherill and Brown). It relies on the assumption that the quantity monitored must be a variable with normal distribution. Therefore, z-score can be used here without losing generality. The cumulative sum, following observation t, is given by:

                                   (3)

where k is a parameter to be defined and often chosen to be 1/2. Therefore, those z values that exceed h are cumulated.  A change in mean is singled where  is larger than a critical value, h. High values of h will lead to a low probability of a false alarm but a lower probability of detecting a real change. So h is determined by the case how large the rate of false alarm is accepted.

 

(3) A cumulative sum approach for the nearest neighbor statistic

At each stage when a new event is observed (from time t-1 to t), we random generate a point within the study area, and the distance from it to its nearest neighbor is calculated. This should be repeated for a large number of times, therefore the mean (d) and variance () of the distances from the randomly generated points to their nearest neighbors can be found. We should be able to get z-score from equation (1). Following the equation (3), to detect departures from randomness in the direction of clusters, one would use:

                                   (4)

A single of change in pattern will be sound when >h. Because distances to nearest neighbors can not meet the requirement of a normal distribution posted by cusum approach, we need to aggregate successive, normalized observations into batches by summing the z-scores within a batch. Batch size, b, is another parameter. Normally, the value of b can be quite small.

 

This approach has been proven to be very effective, resulting in quick detection of deviations from expected pattern. Please see the paper by Rogerson (1997) and the paper by Rogerson and Sun (2000) for detailed discussion. As suggested by them, other statistical measures can be used in conjunction of cumulative sum analysis as well.

 

2. Integration

 

GIS have been proven very useful for spatial analysis due to its capabilities of managing large geographic database and providing visualization techniques. However in real-world practice, how to integrate them is of great question to many domain analysts. Hopefully the potentials brought by the recent advance of the so-called “Object-Oriented” paradigm in computer science can be demonstrated hereunder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


(1) Integration strategy

One of the objectives of this project is to develop a stand-alone package as an interface between the statistical models and end-users. This piece of software should be able to work without specific GIS software installed and must have the basic map operations, like zoom in, zoom out, pan etc. To develop it, there are basic two major strategies:

  • Strongly coupled strategy: in this strategy, there are two sub-types. In the first one, analysis and modeling tools are coded as modules within GIS, therefore extending the functionality of the system. This strategy can also be called ‘GIS include models’ approach. The other is called ‘Models include GIS’, in which some GIS basic operations are included in Statistical models.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


·        Loosely coupled strategy: in this strategy, tools are independent of a GIS and they exchange data via files. This strategy is also known as ‘models are connected to GIS’.

 

 

 

 

 

 


This software must be a seamless and integrated package and can later be distributed for end-users. Besides, only some basic GIS operations are needed. As we know, most GIS operations are very complicated and time consuming. Somehow, at certain time we just need some of them. Thus the combination of ‘Models include GIS’ and ‘Models are connected to GIS’ is more appropriate here. Thanks to the advancement of computer technology. The emergence of Object-Orientated programming and modeling approach makes this possible.

 

·        Component Object Model (COM): this is more flexible strategy. GIS operations are coded as individual piece. The user has a choice to choose which GIS operations to include.

 

Therefore, I chose ESRI MapObjects 2 as GIS components, Visual Basic as programming language, and Gauss as modeling language. The integration is sort of based on the combination of COM and ‘Model are connected to GIS’. Gauss is an advanced language based on matrix operations. It’s very fast when it comes to statistical and matrix calculation.

 

(2) GIS interface

The interface looks like the below figure. The Legend, the left part of the main interface, controls the order of the map layers and the user can turn on/off specific layers by checking/un-checking the respective checkboxes. Inside the Map View, the blue dots represent all the observations (events) of 1996 arsons reported by Police Department of Buffalo City, New York, and the background is the street network of Buffalo City. At the right corner is a Toolbox containing some basic map controls, such as identity, pan, zoom in, zoom out, full extent and spatial selection. At the top of the main interface, there are the Menu Bar and Tool Bar which allow the user to access the specific map operations and analytical functions. In addition by double-clicking the Legend or clicking the Layer Properties Button, the user can change the properties of the active/current layer and carry out thematic mapping on that layer.

 

Figure-1: Interface and Toolbox

 

One of the major tasks of this package is to implement Cumulative Analysis Module. Figure-2 is the input window of this function. The user can set the certain parameters, which are then used to generate Gauss programs. Gauss programs finish most of the statistical and matrix calculation, and final results are saved in files specified by the user. Gauss programs also create a trend graph (Figure-3), which show those potential events that might cause the occurrence of clustering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


             

The results saved from Gauss programs then can be used for further interactive analysis (Figure-4). The chart shown in left is the same graph in Figure-3, and it shows the trend how the cumulative sum changes while new observation added. Obviously, an alarm (potentially the sum will be above the red slash line, but actually it’s set back to 0) is sound when an observation is added and the cumulative sum is over a critical value. The right table is the total list of those observations and those causing alarm are labeled as you can see.

 

Figure-4: Animation Control

 

By Linking the Map View, Table, and Chart, we can easily look at the location of the observation in the Map View. When the user selects any point in either Map View, Table or Chart, the respective point in Map View, Table or Chart will be highlighted as well (Figure-5).

 

Figure-5: Linking Map View, Chart and Table

 

To better understand this, an Animation function is implemented in addition to this. The below is a snapshot during an animation run. The yellow circles are the latest 10 observations (events) just before the current observation (event) which is represented as pine triangle here, and the red triangles are the events causing an alarm when the cumulative sum passing a predefined critical value which is set as 4.12 standard deviation unit in this test run.

 

Figure-6: Snapshot of Animation