Accurate crime prediction can help allocate police resources for crime reduction and prevention. There are two popular approaches to predict criminal activities: one is based on historical crime, and the other is based on environmental variables correlated with criminal patterns. Previous research on geo-statistical modeling mainly considered one type of data in space-time domain, and few sought to blend multi-source data. In this research, we proposed a spatio-temporal Cokriging algorithm to integrate historical crime data and urban transitional zones for more accurate crime prediction. Time-series historical crime data were used as the primary variable, while urban transitional zones identified from the VIIRS nightlight imagery were used as the secondary co-variable. The algorithm has been applied to predict weekly-based street crime and hotspots in Cincinnati, Ohio. Statistical tests and Predictive Accuracy Index (PAI) and Predictive Efficiency Index (PEI) tests were used to validate predictions in comparison with those of the control group without using the co-variable. The validation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm with historical crime data and urban transitional zones increased the correlation coefficient by 5.4% for weekdays and by 12.3% for weekends in statistical tests, and gained higher hit rates measured by PAI/PEI in the hotspots test.

As a measurement of the residential population, the Census population ignores the mobility of the people. This weakness may be alleviated by the use of ambient population, derived from social media data such as tweets. This research aims to examine the degree in which geotagged tweets, in contrast to the Census population, can explain crime. In addition, the mobility of Twitter users suggests that tweets as the ambient population may have a spillover effect on the neighboring areas. Based on a yearlong geotagged tweets dataset, negative binomial regression models are used to test the impact of tweets derived ambient population, as well as its possible spillover effect on theft crimes. Results show: (1) Tweets count is a viable replacement of the Census population for spatial theft pattern analysis; (2) tweets count as a measure of the ambient population shows a significant spillover effect on thefts, while such spillover effect does not exist for the Census population; (3) the combination of tweets and its spatial lag outperforms the Census population in theft crime analyses. Therefore, the spillover effect of the tweets derived ambient population should be considered in future crime analyses. This finding may be applicable to other social media data as well.

Previous research has recognized the importance of edges to crime. Various scholars have explored how one specific type of edges such as physical edges or social edges affect crime, but rarely investigated the importance of the composite edge effect. To address this gap, this study introduces nightlight data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite sensor on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (NPP-VIIRS) to measure composite edges. This study defines edges as nightlight gradients—the maximum change of nightlight from a pixel to its neighbors. Using nightlight gradients and other control variables at the tract level, this study applies negative binomial regression models to investigate the effects of edges on the street robbery rate and the burglary rate in Cincinnati. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) of models show that nightlight gradients improve the fitness of models of street robbery and burglary. Also, nightlight gradients make a positive impact on the street robbery rate whilst a negative impact on the burglary rate, both of which are statistically significant under the alpha level of 0.05. The different impacts on these two types of crimes may be explained by the nature of crimes and the in-situ characteristics, including nightlight.

Crime prediction using machine learning and data fusion assimilation has become a hot topic. Most of the models rely on historical crime data and related environment variables. The activity of potential offenders affects the crime patterns, but the data with fine resolution have not been applied in the crime prediction. The goal of this study is to test the effect of the activity of potential offenders in the crime prediction by combining this data in the prediction models and assessing the prediction accuracies. This study uses the movement data of past offenders collected in routine police stop-and-question operations to infer the movement of future offenders. The offender movement data compensates historical crime data in a Spatio-Temporal Cokriging (ST-Cokriging) model for crime prediction. The models are implemented for weekly, biweekly, and quad-weekly prediction in the XT police district of ZG city, China. Results with the incorporation of the offender movement data are consistently better than those without it. The improvement is most pronounced for the weekly model, followed by the biweekly model, and the quad-weekly model. In sum, the addition of offender movement data enhances crime prediction, especially for short periods.