An Adaptive Spatial Resolution Method Based on the ST-ResNet Model for Hourly Property Crime Prediction

Abstract

Effective predictive policing can guide police patrols and deter crime. Hourly crime prediction is expected to save police time. The selection of spatial resolution is important due to its strong relationship with the accuracy of crime prediction. In this paper, we propose an adaptive spatial resolution method to select the best spatial resolution for hourly crime prediction. The ST-ResNet model is applied to predict crime risk, with historical crime data and weather data as predictive variables. A prediction accuracy index (PAI) is used to evaluate the accuracy of the results. Data on property crimes committed in Suzhou, a big city in China, were selected as the research data. The experiment results indicate that a 2.4 km spatial resolution leads to the best performance for crime prediction. The adaptive spatial resolution method can be used to guide police deployment.

1. Introduction

One of the main goals of crime prediction is to efficiently guide police deployment such that predicted crimes can be dealt with effectively [1]. In this context, researchers and police practitioners worldwide are increasingly looking into efficient methods for predictive policing [2]. Many types of data have been used to improve the efficiency and accuracy of crime prediction results, including historical crime records and socioenvironmental data [1,3,4,5].

Retrospective studies using historical crime records are commonly related to hotspot analysis. Using recent crime data, hotspots are detected and mapped to identify emerging crimes [6,7]. In this context, crime hotspots are assumed to be stable over time [8,9]. This assumption may work well for long-term high-crime areas due to the concentrated disadvantages [10]. In order to improve the accuracy of short-term predictions, recent crimes are used to predict high-crime areas, for example via self-exciting point process models and near-repeat approaches [11,12,13]. Moreover, criminology theories are proposed to interpret why crimes tend to happen at a specific place and time [10,14,15,16], and some methods such as geographically weighted regression and geographical and temporal weighted regression have been used to explore the environmental factors of crime distribution [17,18]. However, the dynamic nature of crime calls for more proactive methods [19,20].

In practice, the predicted crime risk may exist for a short time but dissipate rapidly due to unexpected activities (e.g., the disappearance of criminogenic opportunities) [21]. In addition, a small time window may reduce the significance of historic data and lead to greater noise in crime prediction [9,22]. This makes it difficult to effectively predict emerging crimes, limiting the success of traditional methods for short-term prediction. Hence, short-term prediction is urgently needed in policing practice.

Fortunately, the development of deep learning has made it possible to perform effective short-term crime prediction, facilitated by socioeconomic factors as well as historical crime data [23,24,25]. For example, Alexander et al. used a deep neural network model for crime prediction using historical crime data, demographic data, weather records, and transportation sites [26]. When the time window is small, the neural network model does not perform well, with even further calculations being performed. To address this shortcoming, He et al. presented a deep residual network (ResNet) model to improve the model performance when the time window is small [27]. Zhang et al. applied this model to hourly crowd prediction by adapting it to the time dimension [28]. Using an ST-ResNet model that can capture spatial structures with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and learn temporal dependencies with recurrent neural networks (RNNs), Wang et al. provided an hourly crime prediction method based on weather record and historical crime data from Los Angeles [29].

It is well known that crime is not evenly distributed in space [30,31]. Most crimes are more likely to be committed at specific times of day [30]. The clustering nature of crime is often interpreted by repeat and near-repeat phenomena, which have been identified for many crime types, including vehicle thefts, street robberies, residential burglaries, etc. [32,33,34]. Repeat and near-repeat phenomena confirm the strong relationship between crimes’ proximity in space and time [23]. The Knox method is often used to quantify the influence of this phenomenon [35]. Many studies have proven that repeat and near-repeat patterns vary in different regions. For example, there was a significant near-repeat pattern for 2 months within 400 m in Merseyside, UK, but in Nanjing, China, this pattern occurred within 14 days and 300 m [19,36]. The analysis of repeat and near-repeat phenomena is crucial for practical crime prediction [37,38].

Grid cell size is an important parameter in crime prediction, and crime forecasts are sensitive to the spatial discretization scheme used [7,31,39,40,41]. Scale problems of the modifiable areal unit problem can impact the proportion of difference related to surrounding areas [42]. It varies between crime types and study regions [39]. To find an optimal unit for mapping crime, some different approaches have been explored. Oberwittler and Wikström analyzed robustness and internal uniformity in order to choose the optimal area for regressions [39]. Gerell et al. computed intraclass correlations (ICCs) as a criterion by hierarchical linear modeling to select an optimal surrounding environment size for an understanding of the geography of arson incidents [43]. Malleson et al. estimated the similarity between spatial point patterns at each resolution to determine an adequate unit when aggregating point data to areas [44]. Ramos et al. balanced robustness to error and internal uniformity to determine an optimal granularity to produce more reliable crime maps [45]. The criteria of the optimal unit in crime mapping vary depending on the purpose of crime analysis. In this paper, we focus on the accuracy of hourly crime prediction when selecting the optimal unit, and choose the prediction accuracy index (PAI), which can measure the accuracy level of model results, as a criterion to meet the needs of the actual patrol [6]. The deep learning model ST-ResNet is constructed to extract the feature of a sparse matrix of hourly crime data. The influence of different spatial resolutions on prediction results is analyzed iteratively, and the highest PAI is calculated in the optimal resolution for the model. The time cost of deep learning models for short-term prediction is higher than that of traditional models for long-time prediction. To reduce the computational cost, we adopt a hierarchical pyramid structure to provide different resolutions by an automated process.

In order to select the best spatial resolution in crime prediction at hourly temporal scales, we propose an adaptive spatial resolution method. A data pyramid is built to obtain information at different resolutions. The ST-ResNet models are constructed to predict crimes at different scales by analyzing the heterogeneity of crime and weather data. Then, the accuracy of prediction results at each resolution is compared based on the PAI. The validation and accuracy assessments indicate that our method can achieve ideal hourly forecasting results to satisfy the specific requirements of public security prevention and control.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the study area and data. Section 3 defines the methodology used to achieve the best prediction effectiveness. Section 4 presents and discusses the prediction results. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the conclusions and directions of future work.

2. Study Area and Data

2.1. Study Area and Property Crime Data

Statistically, property infringement cases account for over 70% of the crimes in China [46]. The wide range of patrols required and insufficient police force lead to a low rate of solving such cases [47]. We can improve the efficiency of resource allocation and plan effective proactive interventions by assigning patrols properly, which can be achieved through effective crime prediction [48].

Suzhou City, with a population of approximately 10,616,000 people, is located in southeastern Jiangsu Province, China. It is the city with the sixth-highest GDP in China. The Yangtze River is to the north of Suzhou and Taihu Lake (the third-largest freshwater lake in China) is to the west of Suzhou. Suzhou is an important city of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration in the Taihu Lake Basin, where the economy is active and transportation is widely available. A solution for effective crime prediction that can be applied to each area is necessary to help the police arrange their force and reduce the crime rate. Among the five municipal districts of Suzhou, we selected the four that account for more than 80% of the city’s criminal cases from 2012 to 2013, namely, Huqiu District, Gusu District, Wuzhong District, and Xiangcheng District, and eliminated their water areas to create our study area.

Figure 1 shows the kernel density estimation of all property crimes (over 130,000 cases) in the study area from January 2012 to October 2013. The crime data were acquired from the local police department, and the dataset contains the case number, crime type, occurring time, geographical coordinates, etc. In this paper, our target crime types were burglary, theft, and robbery, which are classified by the police as common types of property crime in Suzhou [3,49,50].

2.2. Weather Data

Weather can influence crime rates and criminal behavior, and each variable has a diverse effect on different crime types [51,52,53]. In short-term crime prediction, weather variables are common predictors, and temperature is a significant one for property crime prediction [29,54]. In this study, we chose temperature as the external influence of the model. Data on daily average temperature, highest temperature, and lowest temperature data for the 671 days from January 2012 to October 2013 were collected from the China Ministry of Agriculture Planning and Design Institute [55].

3. Methodology

To improve the effectiveness of hourly crime prediction, we proposed an adaptive spatial resolution method to select the optimal unit for crime prediction models. The ST-ResNet model was used to predict the crime risk. The PAI was used to measure the accuracy of the results at different spatial resolutions [29]. Figure 2 indicates the procedure of the method.

A data pyramid [56] was produced to aggregated points to the grid at multiple scales, as shown in Figure 3. Most web mapping services like Google Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps adopt the pyramid technique to provide on-demand map content to users [57,58]. The discretization method we used is the same as in these web mapping services. The procedure starts with a coarse resolution and then recursively generates the other resolutions. The points are aggregated to the layers in each calculation of the ST-ResNet model. The base resolution is set to 9.6 km, which corresponds to the 12th level of the pyramid according to the local maximum patrol area.

The research area was overlaid by grid cells of various resolutions. The high-resolution layer has small grids that cover a small area and the low-resolution layer has large grids that cover a large area. The crimes were aggregated to the space time grids based on their geocoordinates and time. The number of crimes was counted by grid and assigned to the corresponding cells of a layer.

For the weather data, the grid cells of a time layer share the same value because the weather is homogeneous over the research area. The established layers were divided into training data and test data. Training data were used to train the ST-ResNet model M (as discussed in Section 3.1) and identify the optimal parameters in a certain spatial resolution. Then, the crime risk was calculated with test data evaluated by the PAI.

By increasing the level of layer d in the pyramid, the resolution of the grid is increased. The crimes were re-aggregated to the grids of another layer. To minimize the influence of time variation of crime, crimes committed over 12 months were selected as training data and the crimes committed in the following month were selected to verify the accuracy of the model. This process was carried out recursively for certain times until the highest-resolution layer was obtained. PAI was included in the model to evaluate the accuracy of the calculations.

3.1. ST-ResNet Model

The ST-ResNet model predicts crime risk based on weather records as well as crime patterns including trend, period, and closeness (Figure 4). The trend indicates the tendency of the number of crimes to increase or decrease. The period refers to the periodic pattern of crime at a certain time scale. Compared with distant ones, crimes committed closer together in time are more likely to be related. Therefore, “closeness” refers to the time distance between crime pairs. Following the research of Wang (2019), the experiment adopted hourly, daily, and weekly levels as the time spacings of the 3 crime periodic characteristics [29].

Figure 4 shows the process of the ST-ResNet model. In the convolution step, multilayer convolution is selected to measure the relationship between nonadjacent regions. The 3 periodic components and the external component (weather) are fused via a parametric-matrix-based fusion method.

The model utilizes the historical crime spatial distributions ${\left\{X_t\right\}}_{t=1}^n$ and weather records ${\left\{W_t\right\}}_{t=1}^{n+1}$ to predict crime spatial distribution $X_{n+1}$ at time $t_{n+1}$, where $X_1$, $X_2$,…, $X_{n+1}$ are the layers representing crime spatial distributions at times $t$, $t_2$,…, $t_{n+1},$ and $W_1$, $W_2$,…, $W_{n+1}$ are the weather layers.

We minimized the root-mean-square error (RMSE) between the predicted crime matrix and the true crime matrix to train the model:

$$RMSE=\sqrt{\frac{1}{Z}{\displaystyle \sum }_i{\left(x_i-{\widehat{x}}_i\right)}^2}$$

(1)

where $x_i$ is the true value, ${\widehat{x}}_i$ is the predicted value, and Z is the number of training data points [59].

The modeling process was conducted as follows: A training dataset (from January 2012 to December 2012) was used to train the model with cross-validation (20% validation ratio), and a test set (from January 2013 to October 2013) was used to test the final model. The model was trained over multiple iterations to select the final model, with the optimal tuning parameters based on minimizing the cross-validation error. Then, we made predictions about the test set using the final model and evaluated the prediction effect. Accounting for the fact that seasonal differences potentially influence results, for each month of the test set we repeatedly predicted crime events for each variation of the methodological parameters. That is, for each variation, predictions were made using a rolling window (e.g., when predicting for January 2013 using 1 year of historical data, the data from January 2012 to December 2012 were used for training; when predicting for February 2013, data from February 2012 to January 2013 were used; and so on): the prediction accuracy was calculated for each month and then averaged for each variation for the test set.

3.2. Accuracy Evaluation

The RMSE, which evaluates the difference between the predicted and the values observed, and the F1 score [60], which evaluates the precision and recall, are scale-dependent. A commonly used crime prediction evaluation index is the prediction accuracy index (PAI) [6]. This can be used to compare the accuracy of hotspots calculated by different methods via extremely simple calculations and can compare the prediction results at different resolutions and magnitudes. The general form of this variable is as follows:

$$PAI=\frac{n/N}{a/A}$$

(2)

where $n$ is the number of crime events in areas where crimes are predicted to occur. $N$ is the number of actual crime events in the whole study area. $a$ is the area of regions where crimes are predicted to occur. $A$ is the area of the study area. The PAI can be considered as the hit rate in areas where crimes are predicted to occur with respect to the size of the study area. The higher the hit rate and the better the prediction effect, the higher the PAI will be.

4. Results

4.1. Data Analysis

Crime risk measured by a repeat and near-repeat calculator varies among different crime types [52]. We calculated the proximity, periodicity, and heterogeneity of crimes in space and time. Finally, the correlation between temperature variation and crime level was tested.

Figure 5 shows the daily statistics, 7-day moving average data, 14-day moving average data, and 30-day moving average data for property crime events from January 2012 to October 2013.

The near-repeat calculator uses the Knox test to analyze the coordinates within a given time span by Monte Carlo simulations to detect the near-repeat phenomenon [61]. We set a spatial bandwidth of 300 m because the block length of our study area is about 300 m. We set the temporal bandwidth at 7 days. The Manhattan distance was used because it is close to an approximation of the actual route for urban environments.

Table 1. Observed-to-expected mean frequencies for property crime events.

	0–7 Days	8–14 Days	15–21 Days	22–28 Days	29–35 Days	More Than 35 Days
Same	2.235 **	1.000	1.000	1.000	1.000	0.998
1–300 m	1.047 *	0.951	0.933	1.144	1.000	0.988
301–600 m	1.002	0.996	1.002	1.002	1.000	1.000
601–900 m	0.981	1.017	1.013 *	1.019	1.000	1.001
901–1200 m	1.005	0.988	1.006	1.007	0.998	1.002 *
1201–1500 m	1.003	1.021	0.970	0.932	0.997	1.000
1501–1800 m	1.013 *	0.996	0.980	0.967	0.956	0.999
More than 1800 m	1.011 *	1.001	1.034	1.021	0.987	0.994

* p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01.

shows the crime risk level in a near-repeat matrix; in the case of our study area, there was a significant near-repeat pattern for the first week within 300 m, and the near-repeat phenomenon weakened with time and distance.

The power spectrum method [62] is used to calculate the periods of crime data. The magnitude squared of Fourier coefficients is a measure of power. The power is computed on one-half of the coefficients since half of them are repeated in magnitude. We plotted the power spectra as a function of frequency, measured in cycles per hour and per day. To interpret the view of the cyclical activity more easily, we also plotted power as a function of period, measured in hours and days per cycle. Figure 6 shows the power spectrum (a) and the period of the hourly data (b). The average periods passing the significance test are 24 h, 48 h, 80 h, and 160 h. The repeating short-term cycle can be seen in daily periodicity. Figure 7 shows the power spectrum (a) and the period of the daily data (b). The average periods passing the significance test are 7 days, 14 days, 19 days, 33 days, and 67 days. This shows the weekly trend of the crime data.

We calculated the ratio of the number of cases in adjacent hours, excluding some moments with abnormally high or no cases; then, we counted the number of hours corresponding to each ratio value from January 2012 to October 2013. Figure 8 shows the ratio statistics. Ninety-five percent of adjacent hours have a ratio of cases between 0 and 4. Considering that the number of cases per hour is small, we defined the times when the ratio value was between 0.5 and 2 (which means the change rate is no more than 100%) as no-mutation hours and the times when the ratio value was less than 0.5 or greater than 2 as mutation hours. We also calculated the ratio of the number of cases between periods of two-hour intervals and three-hour intervals.

Table 2. The percentage of no-mutation hours.

Time Interval	No Mutation	Mutation	No-Mutation Percentage
1 h	11204	4876	70.02%
2 h	9738	6702	58.32%
3 h	8709	7371	54.17%

shows the percentages of no-mutation hours in the three situations. Although the percentage of no-mutation hours decreased as the time interval increased, it was still high for all three intervals. Therefore, it can be concluded that there are interactions between the cases at adjacent moments (1–3 h).

Figure 9 shows the changes in daily temperature variables and crime number, and their trends possess a certain relevance. Considering that the study area is a part of a city, there is no significant spatial variation of temperature in this area. Thus, we only analyzed the impact of temperature on crime data over time. A Pearson correlation analysis [63] was used to examine the relationships between the daily temperature variables and crime number.

Table 3. Correlation matrix for daily temperature and crime number.

	Average Temperature	Highest Temperature	Lowest Temperature	Crime Number
Average temperature	-	0.987 **	0.988 **	0.539 **
Highest temperature		-	0.957 **	0.556 **
Lowest temperature			-	0.512 **
Crime number				-

** p < 0.01.

shows the results. The daily temperature variables (average temperature, highest temperature, and lowest temperature) are significantly highly correlative. We chose the daily highest temperature, which is most relevant to the crime number, to use in the crime number regression analysis [52]. The result (R² = 30.9%) indicated that the highest temperature can explain 30.9% of the variance in property crime.

4.2. Data Aggregation

Figure 10 shows the property crime distribution at different spatial resolutions from January 2012 to October 2013. The information of different spatial resolutions of the study area is shown in

Table 4. Different spatial resolutions of the study area.

Level of Layer	Spatial Resolution	Rows	Columns
12th	9.6 km	8	9
13th	4.8 km	15	16
14th	2.4 km	28	32
15th	1.2 km	55	63

. There is a strong clustering characteristic for the crime distribution. The cases are mainly concentrated in the center of the study area.

4.3. ST-ResNet Model for Crime Prediction in Suzhou

We divided the training data from 2012 between a training set and a validation set at a proportion of 9:1. RMSE was employed as the evaluation metric to tune the main hyperparameters to identify the optimal parameters for ST-ResNet models at each resolution, including convolution kernel size, number of convolution kernels, network depth, and length of closeness, period, and trend. The early stopping strategy was adopted to prevent overfitting [64,65]. The training procedure stopped when the RMSE of the validation set was not attenuated for 5 iterations.

We compared the RMSEs between predictions and validation data with different parameters at each resolution. The optimal ST-ResNet model should be constructed with a 3 × 3 convolution kernel size (Appendix A

Table A1. RMSEs at different spatial resolutions with different convolution kernel sizes.

	3 × 3	5 × 5	7 × 7
2.4 km	8.553	8.590	9.047
4.8 km	8.607	10.807	10.819
9.6 km	11.422	11.504	78.614

), 64 convolution kernels (Appendix A

Table A2. RMSEs at different spatial resolutions with different numbers of convolution kernels.

	16	32	64	128
2.4 km	8.670	8.639	8.553	8.604
4.8 km	8.883	8.760	8.607	8.659
9.6 km	11.386	11.258	11.222	11.331

), 8 residual network units (Appendix A Figure A1), and the 3 temporal components (1 h, 1 day, and 1 week) (Appendix A Figure A2, Appendix A Figure A3, Appendix A Figure A4, respectively). According to the previous analysis, the highest daily temperature is proven to be a significant external factor affecting property crimes. In this model, we selected highest daily temperature as the external component.

4.4. Selection of the Optimal Spatial Resolution

We ran models with optimal hyperparameters at different spatial resolutions (from 1.2 km to 9.6 km) and calculated the PAI of the prediction results (shown in Figure 11). The highest PAI was achieved with a 2.4 km spatial resolution in our study area with RMSE = 7.81.

4.5. Evaluation of the Prediction Results

Based on the previous results, the optimal ST-ResNet model is conducted with a 2.4 km spatial resolution. With the test dataset, we calculated its average evaluation indicator values for its prediction results for PAI = 8.8.

Figure 12 shows the prediction results and the actual distributions at the different four resolutions at 12 a.m. on 1 January 2013. Binary maps were adapted because the crime prediction evaluation index PAI deals with a place being a crime hotspot or not (binary). Colored grids represent the occurrence of crimes. In general, true prediction results are concentrated in city centers, which are areas with high crime densities; in edge areas, predictions are poor. Although the similarity between the prediction results and the actual distributions decreases with increasing resolution, there is a trade-off between the grid size and practical police force arrangement. PAI values of prediction results at a 1.2 km resolution (Figure 12b), 2.4 km resolution (Figure 12d), 4.8 km resolution (Figure 12f), and 9.6 km resolution (Figure 12h) resolution are 2.7, 5.9, 9.8, and 3.3, respectively. Larger grid cells can capture more criminal activities but lead to difficulties for police arrangements. Finding crime hotspots with an appropriate grid cell size is crucial to arranging police forces effectively.

5. Conclusions and Future Work

We proposed an adaptive spatial resolution method to select the best spatial resolution for crime prediction at hourly temporal scales based on the ST-ResNet model. In this paper, we discussed the property crime distribution characteristics and the corresponding weather impact factors. Interactive relationships between crimes close in time were confirmed. The periodic characteristic of crime in days and weeks was tested. Spatially, crimes are often clustered, and the degrees of regional crime event clustering at different spatial resolutions are distinct. A pyramid layering model was built to perform the information of different resolutions. The method we proposed can improve the accuracy of the hourly crime prediction model adopted in the research of Wang (2019) by selecting an optimal resolution for it [29]. We believe the current results can be used to allocate police resources more efficiently.

In this study, the results showed that the optimal unit of analysis was neither the finest nor the broadest considered, but an intermediate unit. This is consistent with the research of Ramos et al. (2020) and Malleson et al. (2019) [44,45]. Ramos et al. (2020) recommended crime maps with intermediate granularity as being the most reliable, because coarse granularities may mask crime hotspots and too-fine granularities may make crime counts unstable and unrepresentative [45]. Similarly, Malleson et al. (2019) recommended medium-granularity maps for point data aggregation because they can balance the benefits of smaller units (important heterogeneity which will probably be hidden in larger units is apparent when using smaller units) and the drawbacks of larger ones (including unstable and unrepresentative crime counts) [44].

By contrast, some researchers concluded that “smaller is better” in granularity choice for crime analysis [39,43]. These studies focus on the impact of the social environment on crime level from a micro view. A micro-view analysis may provide the relationship between crime level and its impact factors in small areas. However, these results cannot be used for police deployment. Our method is used to find the most appropriate unit for improving the hit rate of the predicted crime hotspots. The result is expected to improve the local police deployment and deter crime.

Many factors can affect criminal behaviors, and their impact varies in different situations. The occurrence of crime is usually the result of multiple factors. This paper only discusses the temperature factor, and the auxiliary explanation is insufficient. More factors will be considered in future work. Their impact on crime will be analyzed and combined to improve the interpretation of crime to improve the prediction accuracy.