Crime Data Mining An Overview and Case Studies.pdf

Crime Data Mining: An Overview and Case Studies Hsinchun Chen, Wingyan Chung, Yi Qin, Michael Chau, Jennifer Jie Xu, Gang Wang, Rong Zheng, Homa Atabakhsh {hchen, wchung, yiqin, mchau, jxu, gang, rong, homa}@ Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Management Information Systems, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA / Abstract. The concern about national security has increased significantly since the 9/11 attacks. However, information overload hinders the effective analysis of criminal and terrorist activities. Data mining applied in the context of law enforcement and intelligence analysis holds the promise of alleviating such problems. In this paper, we review crime data mining techniques and present four case studies done in our ongoing COPLINK project. 1. Introduction The concern about national security has increased significantly since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and FBI are actively collecting and analyzing information to investigate terrorists’ activities. Local law enforcement agencies have also become more alert to criminal activities in their own jurisdictions. One challenge to law enforcement and intelligence agencies is the difficulty of analyzing large volumes of data involved in criminal and terrorist activities. Data mining holds the promise of making it easy, convenient, and practical to explore very large databases for organizations and users. In this paper, we review data mining techniques applied in the context of law enforcement and intelligence analysis, and present four case studies done in our ongoing COPLINK project (Hauck et al., 2002). 2. An Overview of Crime Data Mining It is useful to review crime data mining in two dimensions: (1) crime types and security concerns and (2) crime data mining approaches and techniques. 2.1 Crime Types and Security Concerns Crime is defined as “an act or the commission of an act that is forbidden, or the omission of a duty that is commanded by