Applying Data Mining to a Homicide

Dataset

Presented By:
A
 Introduction
Homicide: The act where one person kills another.
Data Mining: The process of extracting new and useful information from a large set of data.
 Motivation to use Data Mining
•Crime Prevention and Reduction (Mohler et al, 2011)
•Trends, Target High Crime Areas

•Criminal Profiling (Liu and Cohn, 2012)

•Assists in developing offender profiles by analyzing traits and motives.

•Resource Allocation (Ratcliffe, 2004)

• Analyzing characteristics aids effective law enforcement and emergency services.

•Public Safety and Policy Development (Weisburd et al, 2010).

• Informs evidence-based policies to address root causes of violent crime.

•Predictive Policing (Mohler et al, 2011)

Creates models to anticipate and prevent homicides.
 Motivation to use Data Mining
 Large amounts of data needs to be processed – police time may be wasted
by doing it in a non-computational manner

 Can find hidden patterns – is there something unknown that may benefit the
police?

 Ability to predict – data mining has the capability to predict where and
when a homicide may occur
 What are the goals of data mining?
•To identify patterns: identifying common characteristics of victims, offenders, locations

•To make predictions: estimating who, what, when and where a homicide occurs

•To profile criminals: profiling of potential offenders, victims, and crime types

•To analyse local areas: Geographic distribution of homicides, identifying crime hotspots

•To allocate resources: Investigation, victim support, community outreach

•To evaluate policies: Evidence-based decisions

•To assist victims: Better victim assistance programs and support services
 What impact does this have?
 Crime minimisation: early detection of problems stops killing.

 Resources development: use of resources in high-risk communities increases crime

prevention impact.

 Improve Public Safety: using data collections becomes public safety.

 Quick Decision-Making: fast responses enhance law enforcement decisions.

 Strategic key policies: effective planning is important to reduce homicides.

 Effective Investigation: Evidence based decision speed up effective investigation

Hamza Jan
 Who would use this application?
 Law enforcement : strengthen policing and appoint resources that can be used to prevent crime.

 Analysts: Find similar themes for use of crime lowering action plans.

 Policy makers: Introduce guidelines which are evidence-based and reliable to ensure policies for long term
decrease in crimes.

 Leaders : Uses plans that are community-based alongside law enforcement,

 Investigators: Increase a positive solution to cases and increase availability on these.

 Government: Data is used to assist governments in making decisions that make the public safer.

 Researchers: Data mining can be used to help them understand how criminals work.

 Community: Helps build trust with the people in the community by making it a safer place to live.
 Data Mining Applications in Crime

 Many applications involve predicting crime. For example, Riberio et al

(2022) used data mining to help predict homicides in Brazil.

 The Murder Accountability Project (MAP) developed a clustering algorithm to

assist in cold cases in Ohio. (Goddard, 2017).

 Chang et al (2021) are applying data mining techniques to social media to

identify criminals and potential gangs.
 Applications of Data Mining in the
Crime Domain
Author(s) Research Title Data Mining Methods Used
(bold represents the most efficient
method)
Campdelli (2022) Explainable machine learning for predicting Decision Trees
homicide clearance in the United States Random Forest
Support Vector Machines
XGBoost

Joshi et al (2017) Crime Analysis using k-means Clustering K-Means Clustering

Ribeiro et al (2021) Prediction of Homicides in Urban Centers: A K-Nearest Neighbour

Machine Learning Approach Naïve Bayes
Neural Network
Random Forest

Sousa et al (2019) Cluster analysis of homicide rates in the Density-Based Clustering

Brazilian states of Goiás from 2002 to 2014. Hierarchical Clustering
K-Means Clustering

Wibowo & Oesman The comparative analysis on the accuracy of k- Decision Trees
(2022) NN, Naïve Bayes, and Decision Tree algorithms K-Nearest Neighbour
in predicting crime in Sleman Regency. Naïve Bayes Classification
 What dataset will we use?

 Murder Accountability Project (MAP) have a homicide dataset available for the
public.

 30 Attributes

 Over 850,000 instances

 Wide range of data

 Database Description
Attributes Description Attribute
type
ID A unique identifier of the homicide. Nominal
Cntyfips The city and state of the reporting agency. Nominal
Ori The code of the reporting agency. Nominal
State The state where the agency made the report. Nominal
Agency The name of the reporting agency. Nominal
Agentype The type of agency making the report. Nominal
Source States who sent the report to the agency. Nominal
Solved States whether the case has been solved or not. Nominal
Year The year when the homicide occurred. Interval
Statename The name of the state where the homicide took place. Nominal
Month The month when the homicide occurred Ordinal
Incident The case number of the homicide. Nominal
Actiontype States if the report is new or being updated. Nominal
Homicide States the type of homicide that occurred. Nominal
Situation The number of victims and offenders involved. Nominal
 Database Description
Attributes Description Attribute type
Vicage The age of the victim Ratio
Vicsex The sex of the victim Nominal
Vicrace The race of the victim Nominal
Vicethnic The ethnicity of the victim Nominal
Offage The age of the offender Ratio
Offsex The sex of the offender Nominal
Offrace The race of the offender Nominal
Offethnic The ethnicity of the offender Nominal
Weapon The weapon used to kill the victim Nominal
Relationship The relationship between the victim and the victim. Nominal
Circumstances The scenario in which the homicide theoretically happened Nominal
Subcircum Special circumstances where the victim was a felon. Nominal
Viccount The amount of additional offenders involved. Ratio
Offcount The amount of additional offenders involved. Ratio
Filedate The date the file was recorded. Ordinal
 What data mining techniques will we
use
Data mining techniques can be applied to homicide data to extract meaningful
patterns, trends, and insights.

 k-means clustering: To homicide data involves grouping similar homicide cases

together based on certain features.
 Decision trees: Decision trees are a popular data mining technique that can
be applied to homicide data for analysis and prediction.
 Naive Bayes classification: It's another data mining technique that can be
applied to homicide data for analysis and prediction.
 Benefits of the Data Mining Application

Data mining applications in homicide investigations can provide valuable insights

and support to agencies in solving and preventing such crimes in future.
• We can identify many valuable insight by using data mining algorithm, some of
the techniques can be use to achieve the desired data are below
• Pattern Recognition and Profiling
• Predictive Modelling
• Behavioural Analysis
• Crime Scene Analysis
• Policy Development
 Challenges and Possible Improvements
of Data Mining

 While data mining techniques offer valuable insights into homicide data,
there are several challenges associated with their application.
 Data Quality
 Data Privacy and Ethics
 Dynamic Nature of Crime
 Legal and Ethical Considerations
 Communication of Results
 References
 Bastian Herre, Fiona Spooner and Max Roser (2013) - “Homicides” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Avaialble
at: 'https://ourworldindata.org/homicides' [Online Resource]
 Campdelli, G. M. (2022) Explainable Machine Learning for Predicting Homicide Clearance in the United States. In: Journal of Criminal Justice. Volume 79.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2022.101898
 Chang, V., Mou, Y., Xu, Q.A., Kaur, H. and Liu, B.S., 2021, April. Homicide Network Detection based on Social Network Analysis. In IoTBDS (pp. 329-337).
 Chen, H., Chung, W., Xu, J. J., Wang, G., Qin, Y., & Chau, M. (2004). Crime data mining: A general framework and some examples. IEEE Computer, 37(4), 50-
56.
 Goddard, D. (2017) Engineer Using Big Data to Help Solve Cold Cases. On: The University of Tennessee Knoxville. Available at:
https://news.utk.edu/2017/02/28/engineer-big-data-solve-cold-cases/
 Joshi, A., Sabitha S., and Choudbury, T. (2017) “Crime Analysis Using K-Means Clustering”. 3 rd International Conference on Computational Intelligence and
Networks (CINE). Odisha, India pp 33-39. Available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8307327&isnumber=8307309
 Liu, X., & Cohn, T. (2012). Automatic criminal personality profiling. In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 113-121).
 Mohler, G., Short, M. B., Brantingham, P. J., Schoenberg, F. P., & Tita, G. E. (2011). Self-exciting point process modeling of crime. Journal of the American
Statistical Association, 106(493), 100-108.
 Ratcliffe, J. H. (2004). The hotspot matrix: A framework for the spatio-temporal targeting of crime reduction. Police practice and research, 5(1), 5-23.
 Ribeiro, J., Meneses, L., Costa, D., Miranda, W. and Alves, R., 2022. Prediction of Homicides in Urban Centers: A Machine Learning Approach. In Intelligent Systems and Applications:
Proceedings of the 2021 Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) Volume 3 (pp. 344-361). Springer International Publishing.
 Souse, S., Del-Fiaco, R. and Berton, L. (2019) Cluster analysis of homicide rates in the Brazilian states of Goias from 2002 to 2014. At: XLIV Latin American
Computer Conference (CLEI), Sao Paulo, Brazil. pp.445-454. DOI: 10.1109/CLEI.2018.00060.
 Weisburd, D., Telep, C. W., & Eck, J. E. (2010). What can police do to reduce crime, disorder, and fear? The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, 593(1), 42-65.
 Wibowo, A. & Oesman, T. I (2020) The comparative analysis on the accuracy of k-NN, Naïve Bayes, and Decision Tree Algorithms in predicting criminal
actions in Sleman regency. In: Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Volume 1450. At: International Conference on Applied Science and Technology (iCAST
on Engineering science). DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/1450/1/012076
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