# Crime Prediction with Graph Neural Networks and Multivariate Normal Distributions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14733 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14733/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [DeepAR: Probabilistic Forecasting with Autoregressive Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04110/) (2017)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [Structured Sequence Modeling with Graph Convolutional Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07659/) (2016)
- [Structural-RNN: Deep Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05298/) (2015)
- [PyTorch Geometric Temporal: Spatiotemporal Signal Processing with Neural Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07788/) (2021)
- [HAGEN: Homophily-Aware Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Crime Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12846/) (2021)
- [Graph-Based Deep Modeling and Real Time Forecasting of Sparse Spatio-Temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00684/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Real Time Crime Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03340/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Predictive Learning in Urban Computing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14483/) (2023)
- [Cybercrime Prediction via Geographically Weighted Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04635/) (2024)
- [NK-GAD: Neighbor Knowledge-Enhanced Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15668/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing approaches to the crime prediction problem are unsuccessful in expressing the details since they assign the probability values to large regions. This paper introduces a new architecture with the graph convolutional networks (GCN) and multivariate Gaussian distributions to perform high-resolution forecasting that applies to any spatiotemporal data. We tackle the sparsity problem in high resolution by leveraging the flexible structure of GCNs and providing a subdivision algorithm. We build our model with Graph Convolutional Gated Recurrent Units (Graph-ConvGRU) to learn spatial, temporal, and categorical relations. In each node of the graph, we learn a multivariate probability distribution from the extracted features of GCNs. We perform experiments on real-life and synthetic datasets, and our model obtains the best validation and the best test score among the baseline models with significant improvements. We show that our model is not only generative but also precise.