Exploratory Data Analysis and Crime Prediction for Smart Cities

Crime has been prevalent in our society for a very long time and it continues to be so even today. Currently, many cities have released crime-related data as part of an open data initiative. Using this as input, we can apply analytics to be able to predict and hopefully prevent crime in the future. In this work, we applied big data analytics to the San Francisco crime dataset, as collected by the San Francisco Police Department and available through the Open Data initiative. The main focus is to perform an in-depth analysis of the major types of crimes that occurred in the city, observe the trend over the years, and determine how various attributes contribute to specific crimes. Furthermore, we leverage the results of the exploratory data analysis to inform the data preprocessing process, prior to training various machine learning models for crime type prediction. More specifically, the model predicts the type of crime that will occur in each district of the city. We observe that the provided dataset is highly imbalanced, thus metrics used in previous research focus mainly on the majority class, disregarding the performance of the classifiers in minority classes, and propose a methodology to improve this issue. The proposed model finds applications in resource allocation of law enforcement in a Smart City.