Comparing accuracy of geographic profiling by differences in distance measures

Abstract

The accuracy of geographic proˆling for predicting a serial oŠender's home / base location was compared by using three diŠerent distance measures  the Euclidean distance, the Manhattan distance, and the Shortest route distance  using the data of 1,856 crimes committed by 124 residential burglars in Northern Tohoku area of Japan from 2004 to 2015. Logarithmic and the negative exponential coe‹cients were estimated as the distance decay function for each distance measure by using leave-one-out cross-validation. Also, search areas were calculated to compare the accuracy of geographic proˆling. Results of the Friedman's test indicated signiˆcant diŠerences in search areas of the three distance measures for tance when calculating the probability distribution for oŠenders committing crimes in a wide area that includes many edges, such as rivers, railroads, and mountains, as well as paths such as bridges and railroad crossings.