London's Crime Hot Spots Predicted Using Mobile Phone Data

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes A growing number of police forces around the world are using data on past crimes to predict the likelihood of crimes in the future. These predictions can be made more accurate by combining crime data with local demographic data about the local population. However, this data is time consuming and expensive to collect and so only updated rarely. Now a team of data experts have shown how combing crime data with data collected from mobile phones can make the prediction of future crimes even more accurate. The team used an anonymised dataset of O2 mobile phone users in the London metropolitan area during December 2012 and January 2013. They then used a small portion of the data to train a machine learning algorithm to find correlations between this and local crime statistics in the same period. Finally, they used the trained algorithm to predict future crime rates in the same areas. Without the mobile phone data, the predictions have an accuracy of 62 per cent. But the phone data increases this accuracy significantly to almost 70 per cent. What's more, the data is cheap to collect and can be gathered in more or less real time. Whether the general population would want their data used in this way is less clear but either way Minority Report-style policing is looking less far-fetched than when the film appeared in 2002.

Comments

Here's the algorithm

[badzilla]

More phones in an area = more people. More people = more crime.

Re:Price of safety

[CanHasDIY]

Crime reduction is certainly a worthy reward, but as the article says, lots of people might not be too happy with having their information shared this way.

Especially considering that said "information sharing" leads to a mere 8% increase in accuracy.

Let's hope it is truly anonymous (which I doubt) and see how it goes.

Let's assume that it's not, and see how it's used nefariously. That's not cynicism, that's realism.