Empirical Discriminative Tensor Analysis for Crime Forecasting

Police agencies have been collecting increasing amount of information to better understand patterns in criminal activity. Recently there is a new trend on using the data collected to predict where and when crime will occur. Crime prediction is greatly beneficial because if it is done accurately, police practitioner would be able to allocate resources to the geographic areas most at risk for criminal activity and ultimately make communities safer. In this paper, we discuss a new four-order tensor representation for crime data. The tensor encodes the longitude, latitude, time, and other relevant incidents. Using the tensor data structure, we propose the Empirical Discriminative Tensor Analysis (EDTA) algorithm to obtain sufficient discriminative information while minimizing empirical risk simultaneously. We examine the algorithm on the crime data collected in one Northeastern city. EDTA demonstrates promising results compared to other existing methods in real world scenarios.