Survey of Data Mining Methods for Crime Analysis and Visualization

Crime prevention is a primary concern of police as they perform their central role of protecting the lives and property of citizens. But the police force is usually relatively very small compared to the crime prone population they have to protect making them more of a reactive rather than preventive force. Police often have at their disposal vast amounts of least utilised crime data (such as crime incident reports) which if analysed could reveal some hidden information such as crime committing trends useful in crime prevention. Use of Information Systems techniques such as data mining and Geographic Information Systems for analysing these data is promising in boosting the police efforts. This paper reviews the applicability of various data mining methods and Geographic Information Systems in crime analysis and visualization in mainly poor planned settings characterised by missing electronic data a common phenomena in the developing countries like Uganda. The focus is on criminality of places rather than the tracing of individual criminals. The review tends to reveal that a combination of Geographic Information Systems and data mining techniques that can work under unclean data are best suited for use in the poorly planned settings. 1