Hybrid of deep learning and exponential smoothing for enhancing crime forecasting accuracy

PLoS One. 2022 Sep 7;17(9):e0274172. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274172. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

The continued urbanization poses several challenges for law enforcement agencies to ensure a safe and secure environment. Countries are spending a substantial amount of their budgets to control and prevent crime. However, limited efforts have been made in the crime prediction area due to the deficiency of spatiotemporal crime data. Several machine learning, deep learning, and time series analysis techniques are exploited, but accuracy issues prevail. Thus, this study proposed a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) and Exponential Smoothing (ES) hybrid for crime forecasting. The proposed technique is evaluated using New York City crime data from 2010-2017. The proposed approach outperformed as compared to state-of-the-art Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Averages (SARIMA) with low Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) (0.3738, 0.3891, 0.3433,0.3964), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE)(13.146, 13.669, 13.104, 13.77), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) (9.837, 10.896, 10.598, 10.721). Therefore, the proposed technique can help law enforcement agencies to prevent and control crime by forecasting crime patterns.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Crime
  • Data Collection
  • Deep Learning*
  • Forecasting
  • Models, Statistical*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia for Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) with Project Code: FRGS/1/2020/TK03/USM/02/1, School of Computer Sciences and University Sains Malaysia (USM).