Spatio-temporal crime predictions in smart cities: A data-driven approach and experiments

Steadily increasing urbanization is causing significant economic and social transformations in urban areas, posing several challenges related to city management and services. In particular, in cities with higher crime rates, effectively providing for public safety is an increasingly complex undertaking. To handle this complexity, new technologies are enabling police departments to access growing volumes of crime-related data that can be analyzed to understand patterns and trends. These technologies have potentially to increase the efficient deployment of police resources within a given territory and ultimately support more effective crime prevention. This paper presents a predictive approach based on spatial analysis and auto-regressive models to automatically detect high-risk crime regions in urban areas and to reliably forecast crime trends in each region. The algorithm result is a spatio-temporal crime forecasting model, composed of a set of crime-dense regions with associated crime predictors, each one representing a predictive model for estimating the number of crimes likely to occur in its associated region. The experimental evaluation was performed on two real-world datasets collected in the cities of Chicago and New York City. This evaluation shows that the proposed approach achieves good accuracy in spatial and temporal crime forecasting over rolling time horizons.