Predicting the locations of missing persons in China by using NGO data and deep learning techniques

Abstract

ABSTRACT Missing person crimes can seriously affect the well-being of Chinese families, and missing person destination prediction can help to solve this problem. Using nongovernmental organization (NGO) data to predict the locations of missing persons by random forest (RF) model has made progress. However, studies using these data have ignored the mass of oral information. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of oral information in detecting missing persons, but the impact on destination prediction remains unexplored. Therefore, this study proposes a missing person prediction (MP-Net) framework to incorporate oral information into missing person destination prediction and quantitatively describe the effect of different word properties on the prediction. The results show that compared to the baseline RF model, the proposed framework achieves a higher recall rate (87.18%) in the location prediction of missing persons. According to a quantitative word analysis, verbs and nouns in oral information significantly contributed to location prediction. After adjectives that might cause adverse effects were removed, the stability of the model was improved considerably. Overall, the findings of the proposed model and quantitative word analysis can help police or NGOs collect descriptive information in a targeted manner and make more accurate predictions about the whereabouts of missing persons.