Estimating and predicting the temporal information of apartment burglaries that possess imprecise time stamps: A comparative study using eight different temporal approximation methods in Vienna, Austria

Abstract

This research compares and evaluates different approaches to approximate offense times of crimes. It contributes to and extends all previously proposed naïve and aoristic temporal approximation methods and one recent study [1] that showed that the addition of historical crimes with accurately known time stamps to temporal approximation methods can outperform all traditional approximation methods. It is paramount to work with crime data that possess precise temporal information to conduct reliable (spatiotemporal) analysis and modeling. This study contributes to and extends existing studies on temporal analysis. One novel and one relatively new temporal approximation methods are introduced that rely on weighting aoristic scores with historic offenses with exactly known offense times. It is hypothesized that these methods enhance the accuracy of the temporal approximation. In total, eight different methods are evaluated for apartment burglaries in Vienna, Austria, for yearly and seasonal differences. Results show that the one novel and one relatively new method applied in this research outperform all other existing approximation methods to estimate and predict offense times. These two methods are particularly useful for both researchers and practitioners, who often work with temporally imprecise crime data.