Mining Social Media Content for Crime Prediction

Social media provides increasing opportunities for users to voluntarily share their thoughts and concerns in a large volume of data. While user-generated data from each individual may not provide considerable information, when combined, they include hidden variables, which may convey significant events. In this paper, we pursue the question of whether social media context can provide socio-behavior "signals" for crime prediction. The hypothesis is that crowd publicly available data in social media, in particular Twitter, may include predictive variables, which can indicate the changes in crime rates. We developed a model for crime trend prediction where the objective is to employ Twitter content to identify whether crime rates have dropped or increased for the prospective time frame. We also present a Twitter sampling model to collect historical data to avoid missing data over time. The prediction model was evaluated for different cities in the United States. The experiments revealed the correlation between features extracted from the content and crime rate directions. Overall, the study provides insight into the correlation of social content and crime trends as well as the impact of social data in providing predictive indicators.