Designing efficient ann classifiers for matching burglaries from dwelling houses

Abstract

Leveraging supervised learning methods is vital for predictive analysis of crime data, however, because of the complex dependencies of crime behavioral variables, classifying behavioral crime profiles is considered to be a demanding task. This paper presents two classifiers for matching single-offender crimes of the type: Burglary from Dwelling Houses (BDH). The first classifier, Multiclass MLP Crime Classifier (M2C2), leverages a multiclass topology to become capable of matching nonprolific offenders in addition to prolific offenders. This method will be useful for matching crimes to several local offenders in a particular district, and it is not suitable for classifying a large number of offenders. Contrarily, the second method, Ensemble Neural Network Crime Classifier (EN2C2), focuses on automating decision-making processes for crime matching through exploiting expert classifiers outputs in a bagging ensemble approach. As demonstrated by evaluative experiments, M2C2 is an efficient approach for classifying small numbers of nonprolific and prolific offenders. The proposed method's performance was proved when compared with other common machine learning techniques. © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.