Forecasting, clustering and patrolling criminal activities

Tools that perform pattern recognition analysis of crimes, comprising at the same time forecasting, clustering, and recommendations on real data such as patrolling routes, are not fully integrated; modules are developed separately, and thus, a single workflow providing all the steps necessary to perform this analysis has not been reported. In this paper, we propose forecasting criminal activity in a particular region by using supervised classification; then, to use this information to automatically cluster and find important hot spots; and finally, to optimize patrolling routes for personnel working in public security. The proposed forecasting model (CR- +) is based on the family of Kora- Logical-Combinatorial algorithms operating on large data volumes from several heterogeneous sources using an inductive learning process. We perform two analyses: punctual prediction and tendency analysis, which show that it is possible to punctually predict one out of four crimes to be perpetrated (crime family, in a specific space and time), and two out of three times the place of crime, despite of the noise of the dataset. The forecasted crimes are then clustered using a density-based clustering algorithm, and finally route patrolling routes were crafted using an ant-colony optimization algorithm. For three different patrolling requirements, we were always able to find optimal routes in shorter time compared to commonly used random walk algorithms. We present a case study based on real crime data from the municipality of Cuautitlán Izcalli, in Mexico.