A Comparative Analysis of Multiple Methods for Predicting a Specific Type of Crime in the City of Chicago

Abstract: Researchers regard crime as a social phenomenon that is influenced by several physical, social, and economic factors. Different types of crimes are said to have different motivations. Theft, for instance, is a crime that is based on opportunity, whereas murder is driven by emotion. In accordance with this, we examine how well a model can perform with only spatiotemporal information at hand when it comes to predicting a single crime. More specifically, we aim at predicting theft, as this is a crime that should be predictable using spatiotemporal information. We aim to answer the question: "How well can we predict theft using spatial and temporal features?". To answer this question, we examine the effectiveness of support vector machines, linear regression, XGBoost, Random Forest, and k-nearest neighbours, using different imbalanced techniques and hyperparameters. XGBoost showed the best results with an F1-score of 0.86.