DATA SCIENCE AND DATA ANALYTICS ON CRIME 1

Dear Valentina,

I started this paper by looking at what I did in the project builders. I took what I

could from the first 4 project builders. After that, I looked at what I needed to do for each article

and did it. Then I looked at the prompt and wrote the introduction and conclusion. Probably not

the best way to do this paper or any paper, but that's just how I did it.

After looking at the prompt and reading one of my peers’ papers I realized I didn't

do the best job at answering the prompt so I went back through and tried to answer the prompt

better.
DATA SCIENCE AND DATA ANALYTICS ON CRIME 2

Jack Phreaner

UCSB

Professor Fahler

August 19, 2020

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Crime, it has been a problem since the beginning of our time and we still do not have

control of it. The main reason why we can not control crime is, there has not been a way to stop

it before it happens. With the rise of data science and data analytics, we are closer than we have

ever been to predicting when a crime will be committed. I chose these because I am interested in

these disciplines and because I know that these two disciplines are being used in this field. Data

science Is used to gather the data in an organized manner. data analytics uses data that has been

gathered and analyzes it to try to find a meaningful result. The articles, ​Exploratory Data

Analysis and Crime Prediction for Smart Cities, ​ by Isha Pradhan, Katerina Potika, Magdalini

Eirinaki, and Petros Potikas, and ​Mining the Relationship between Crimes, Weather and Tweets

by Joseph Alamo, Claudia Fortes, Nicole Occhiogrosso, Ching-yu Huang, give a good

understanding, and real-life examples, of what these two disciplines can do. Data science and

data analytics are very similar, the main difference is that data science is more focused on

gathering data, while data analytics is more focused on taking that data and making it

meaningful. These differences in the two disciplines mean that they create very different

communities even though they might use similar tactics and methods to get their results.

The first article ​Exploratory Data Analysis and Crime Prediction for Smart Cities ​shows

that the goal of using data analytics on crime data is to, “be able to predict and hopefully prevent

crime in the future.”( Pradhan, et al(2019)). The authors used San Francisco’s crime data set to

do their work. This data set has these identifiers: Incident number, Description, day of the week,

the police district, resolution, address, longitude and latitude, pdid, and category. With these

identifiers, they started to analyse the data into tables and graphs. From the graphs, they were
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able to see the rate of a specific crime in a specific area. Because the data set has around fifteen

years of data they were able to make predictions of what the future might look like for San

Francisco crime.

The next article ​Mining the Relationship between Crimes, Weather and Tweets ​This

article is about a research project that tried to find a relationship between the weather tweets and

the crime rate. The authors chose Orlando, Florida for this project. I chose this article to

demonstrate the two disciplines working together. While the main focus of the article is on data

science, they use data analytics after they collected their data to try to find a connection. They

used tables, graphs and charts to help analyze and show their data. At the end of the article, the

authors using the evidence they compiled, argued that there is a relationship between weather

and crime rate, but there is no relationship between tweets and crime rate.

Both of the article’s start with an abstract that gives a summary of what the article is

going to be about and what the authors are trying to accomplish by writing it. The abstract also

has a simple explanation of how the authors will conduct their research. After the abstract, the

authors write about data analytics and how it is being used on crime data. After their

introduction, they write about their research plan and finish with their results. This article gives a

good real-life example of data analytics, it shows that you can get real and reliable information

by analyzing big data sets.

In the first line of the abstract, of the article, ​Mining the Relationship between Crimes,

Weather and Tweets​, the authors talk about their goal which is once again to find a relationship

between weather, crime, and tweets. Then they talk about how they will complete this goal, they
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write, “The central dataset of interest details the crime incidents in Orlando, Florida as reported

daily by the Orlando Police Department. This dataset gives the dates, categories (e.g. theft,

aggravated assault, etc.), and latitude and longitude of each reported crime incident. Using a

Twitter developer account, Tweets pertaining to crime are downloaded from the greater Orlando

area. Tweets are filtered by the following indexed keywords: “crime”, “drugs”, “narcotics”,

“weapons”, “assault”, “theft”, “robbery”, “murder”, and “larceny.” Additionally, Orlando’s daily

weather data is collected from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”(Alamo,

Fortes, Occhiogrosso, Huang (2019)). To show their findings the authors create tables and

graphs, they also explain what the graphs mean, and why they are important.

According to the article, ​Understanding Discourse Communities​ by Dan Melzer using

john Swales definition of discourse communities the author says that discourse communities

have specific features which are, “A broadly agreed-upon set of common public goals,

Mechanisms of intercommunication among members, Use of these communication mechanisms

to provide information and feedback, One or more genres that help further the goals of the

discourse community, A specific lexis (specialized language), A threshold level of expert

members”(Melzer p.102). The authors of ​Mining the Relationship between Crimes, Weather and

Tweets ​fulfil all the criteria of a discourse community. They had a group goal of finishing the

project, they communicated in their group, they had different levels of expertise. This article

gives a good example of how when you put data science and data analytics together you can find

connections in places you wouldn’t think to look. It combines both the disciplines that I am

looking at and it gives a real-world example of how these two disciplines work together.
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Both of the articles, ​Exploratory Data Analysis and Crime Prediction for Smart Cities,

and ​Mining the Relationship between Crimes, Weather and Tweets,​ show that when we use data

science and data analytics on crime statistics there is no limit on what we can achieve. Through

these articles, we can see that data science and data analytics are very similar, but the main

difference is that data science is more focused on gathering data, while data analytics is more

focused on taking that data and making it meaningful. When it comes to data science there really

is no room for creativity, you gather data and put it into a data set. In Data analytics there is

freedom, the data is there, and what you do with it is up to you. These differences in the two

disciplines mean that they create very different communities even though they might use similar

tactics and methods to get their results.

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References

Alamo, J., Fortes, C., Occhiogrosso, N., & Huang, C. (n.d.). Mining the Relationship between

Crimes, Weather and Tweets. Retrieved August 11, 2020, from

https://dl-acm-org.proxy.library.ucsb.edu:9443/doi/epdf/10.1145/3357777.3357787

Lundsford, A., Ruszkiewicz, J., & Walters, K. (2009). Academic Arguments. ​Academic

Arguments,​ 379–411.

https://gauchospace.ucsb.edu/courses/pluginfile.php/10067570/mod_resource/content/

0/Lunsford%20et%20al.%202016%2C%20ch17.pdf

Melzer, D. (2019). Understanding Discourse Communities. ​Understanding Discourse

Communities,​ 100–111.

https://gauchospace.ucsb.edu/courses/pluginfile.php/10067180/mod_resource/content/

0/student%20melzer-understanding-discourse-communities-2-13.pdf

Zhao, X., & Tang, J. (n.d.). Crime in Urban Areas:A Data Mining Perspective. Retrieved August

11, 2020, from

https://dl-acm-org.proxy.library.ucsb.edu:9443/doi/epdf/10.1145/3229329.3229331