# A Comparative Analysis of Multiple Methods for Predicting a Specific Type of Crime in the City of Chicago

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13464 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13464/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Handling Imbalanced Data: A Case Study for Binary Class Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04326/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Researchers regard crime as a social phenomenon that is influenced by several physical, social, and economic factors. Different types of crimes are said to have different motivations. Theft, for instance, is a crime that is based on opportunity, whereas murder is driven by emotion. In accordance with this, we examine how well a model can perform with only spatiotemporal information at hand when it comes to predicting a single crime. More specifically, we aim at predicting theft, as this is a crime that should be predictable using spatiotemporal information. We aim to answer the question: "How well can we predict theft using spatial and temporal features?". To answer this question, we examine the effectiveness of support vector machines, linear regression, XGBoost, Random Forest, and k-nearest neighbours, using different imbalanced techniques and hyperparameters. XGBoost showed the best results with an F1-score of 0.86.