Prediction of crime rate in urban neighborhoods based on machine learning

Abstract

As the impact of crime on the lives of residents has increased, there are a number of methods for predicting where crime will occur. They tend to explore only the association established between a single factor and the distribution of crime. In order to more accurately and quickly visualize and predict crime distribution in different neighborhoods, and to provide a basis for security planning and design by planning designers, this paper uses GAN neural networks to build a prediction model of city floor plans and corresponding crime distribution maps. We take Philadelphia as the research sample, use more than 2 million crime information of Philadelphia from 2006 to 2018 to draw the crime hotspot distribution map, and collect the corresponding map of Philadelphia, and train the model for predicting the crime rate of the city with more than two thousand sets of one-to-one corresponding images as the training set. When the training is complete, a floor plan can be fed directly to the model, and the model will immediately feed back a hotspot map reflecting the crime distribution. Using the untrained Philadelphia data as the test set, the model can accurately predict crime concentration areas and the predicted crime concentration areas are similar to the concentration areas considered in previous studies. With the feedback from the model, the city layout can be adjusted and the crime rate can be greatly reduced when the simulated city planner tunes into the city plan. In addition the ideas in this paper can be applied as a set of methodologies to predict other relevant urban characteristic parameters and visualize them.