Geosocial media data as predictors in a GWR application to forecast crime hotspots

Abstract

In this paper we forecast hotspots of street crime in Portland, Oregon. Our approach uses geosocial media posts, which define the predictors in geographically weighted regression (GWR) models. We use two predictors that are both derived from Twitter data. The first one is the population at risk of being victim of street crime. The second one is the crime related tweets. These two predictors were used in GWR to create models that depict future street crime hotspots. The predicted hotspots enclosed more than 23% of the future street crimes in 1% of the study area and also outperformed the prediction efficiency of a baseline approach. Future work will focus on optimizing the prediction parameters and testing the applicability of this approach to other mobile crime types.