Text Mining and Recommender Systems for Predictive Policing

Abstract

We present some results from a joint project between HP Labs, Cardiff University and Dyfed Powys Police on predictive policing. Applications of the various techniques from recommender systems and text mining to the problem of crime patterns recognition are demonstrated. Our main idea is to consider crime records for different regions and time period as a corpus of text documents with words being crime types. We apply tools from NLP and text documents classifications to analyse different regions in time and space. We evaluate performance of several measures of similarity for texts and documents clustering algorithms.