Clustering of Adolescent Criminal Offenders using Psychological and Criminological Profiles

Abstract

In Criminology research the question arises if certain types of delinquents can be identified from data, and while there are many cases that can not be clearly labeled, overlapping taxonomies have been proposed in [1,2,3]. In a recent study Juvenile offenders (N = 1572) from three state systems were assessed on a battery of criminogenic risk and needs factors and their official criminal histories. Cluster analysis methods were applied. One problem we encountered is the large number of hybrid cases that have to belong to two or more classes. To eliminate these cases we propose a method that combines the results of Bagged K-Means and the consistency method [4], a semi-supervised learning technique. A manual interpretation of the results showed very interpretable patterns that were linked to existing criminologic research.