Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119

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Expert Systems with Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

An intelligent decision-support model using FSOM and rule extraction for

crime prevention
Sheng-Tun Li a,b,*, Shu-Ching Kuo b,c, Fu-Ching Tsai a,d
a
Institute of Information Management, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, Ta-Hsueh Road, Tainan 701, Taiwan
b
Department of Industrial and Information Management, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, ROC
c
Department of Information Management, Diwan College of Management, Taiwan, ROC
d
Pingtung County Police Bureau, No.119, Chungchen Rd., Pingtung City, Taiwan, ROC

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: In the recent era of increasing volume crimes, crime prevention is now one of the most important global
Intelligent decision support issues, along with the great concern of strengthening public security. Government and community offi-
Crime prevention cials are making an all-out effort to improve the effectiveness of crime prevention. Numerous investiga-
Fuzzy self-organizing map network tions addressing this problem have generally employed disciplines of behavior science and statistics.
Temporal rule extraction
Recently, the data mining approach has been shown to be a proactive decision-support tool in predicting
and preventing crime. However its effectiveness is often limited due to different natures of crime data,
such as linguistic crime data evolving over time. In this paper, we propose a framework of intelligent
decision-support model based on a fuzzy self-organizing map (FSOM) network to detect and analyze
crime trend patterns from temporal crime activity data. In addition, a rule extraction algorithm is
employed to uncover hidden causal-effect knowledge and reveal the shift around effect. In contrast to
most present crime related studies, we target a non-Western real-world case, i.e. the National Police
Agency (NPA) in Taiwan. The resultant model can support police managers in assessing more appropriate
law enforcement strategies, as well as improving the use of police duty deployment for crime prevention.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction degree of people’s impression of public security. These lights are

In recent years, volumes of crime had brought serious problems
to many countries in the world. For example, in Taiwan, the crime
volumes have increased more than 71% in a decade, which may not
only bring physical harms but also serious mental injuries for the
victims. In order to avoid the emergence of the calamity, the Na-
tional Police Agency, Taiwan must invest more human resources
in criminal investigation and increase the law enforcement duties,
such as patrolling, raids and guarding for maintaining public order,
preventing all kind of hazards and promoting the welfare of citi-
zens. Traditional law enforcement strategies for crime prevention
focus on preventive police patrol which is the most general duty
for the police. Since 2002, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Taiwan
had been working on a project to examine the public security index
(PSI) with red, yellow, purple, green, blue five lights that represent
five kinds of status of public security, which are ‘‘very bad”, ‘‘bad”,
‘‘intermediate”, ‘‘good”, and ‘‘very good,” in order to strengthen the
* Corresponding author at: Institute of Information Management, National Cheng
Kung University, No. 1, Ta-Hsueh Road, Tainan 701, Taiwan. Tel.: +886 6
2757575x53126; fax: +886 6 2362162.
E-mail addresses: stli@mail.ncku.edu.tw (S.-T. Li), r3892104@mail.ncku.edu.tw
(S.-C. Kuo), r7895104@mail.ncku.edu.tw (F.-C. Tsai).
linguistic in nature in order to more effectively attract people’s
attentions to the public security. Indeed, the formal enforcement
of preventive laws is seen as an important means of preventing
crime and ensuring public safety in modern societies. But increas-
ingly, scholars and public officials were realizing that the tradi-
tional law enforcement was not the only approach to crime
prevention strategy (Visher & Weisburd, 1998). In addition, do-
main experts believed that criminal history model can be used to
identify other analogous pattern (Kaza, Wang, & Chen, 2007).
Therefore, more researches focused on using various intelligent ap-
proaches to analyze different types of crime characteristics and
proceeded specific programs.
The emerging data mining (also known as knowledge discovery
in databases) has been shown to be a powerful and effective meth-
odology to help business users to facilitate intelligent decision
support (Petropoulos, Patelis, Metaxiotis, Nikolopoulos, & Assimak-
opoulos, 2003; Rupnik, Kukar, & Krisper, 2007). In particular, it en-
ables criminal investigators to explore criminal acts quickly and
efficiently (Alexander, Alexander, Nikolay, & Tatyana, 2008; Chen
et al., 2004; Richard, Michael, & John, 2007). In the recent literature,
a variety of data mining techniques had been employed in crime
policy (Adderley, Townsley, & Bond, 2007; Brown & Oxford, 2001;
Chen et al., 2004) and received encouraging results. Yet, most

0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2010.03.004
 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119
researches emphasized criminal analysis of quantitative numeric,
and few existing studies consider linguistic crime data. Conse-
quently, it is imperative to develop novel approaches for handing
such types of data. In this paper, we propose a framework of intel-
ligent decision-support model in order to identify crime trend pat-
terns for different criminal activities, conduct temporal rule
extraction to uncover their shift around effect, and provide a refer-
ence for experts when analyzing the different types of crime. For
crime pattern discovery, we propose a hybrid FSOM model which
combines the features of SOM networks and fuzzy logic in dealing
with clustering, visualization, and linguistic information process-
ing. For temporal crime rule extraction, we use a modified general
rule extraction algorithm to find the hidden causal effects between
different temporal linguistic crime data that can help police manag-
ers understand more clearly the criminal acts. Furthermore, we use
J-measure to quantify and rank the usability of the rules to identify
their relative importance. The experimental results of the frame-
work provide actionable information for the police management
to make better use of its duty deployment and help criminal experts
to develop and implement more effective law enforcement policies
and crime control programs.
The remaining sections of this paper are organized as follows.
Section 2 describes the confronted problem of crime prevention
and reviews the literature related to the problem. Section 3 intro-
duces the essential concepts of FSOM, temporal rule discovery, and
J-measure. Section 4 describes the experimental design for data
collection, network design, and performance evaluation. Section
5 discusses the experimental results and analysis that focus on
the trend pattern analysis of various crimes, shift around effects,
and police duty deployment analysis. Section 6 concludes this pa-
per and gives the future work.
2. Literature review
Because crime has drawn much attention over time, the public
has become increasingly concerned about the government’s re-
sponse to it. The International Journal of Forecasting published a
special issue of crime forecasting in 2003 (Gorr & Harries, 2003).
Numerous modern researches of crime certainly demonstrate that
the sharply rising crime volume has blossomed into a high-priority
problem that needs to be promptly solved. In order to prevent
criminal acts and discover crime trend, researchers have developed
a number of methods to support law enforcement activities over
the last two decades. These works originate from disciplines of
behavior and psychology, statistics, and artificial intelligence.
The approach of behavior science and psychology has been
aimed at preventing individuals from committing crimes since
the 1960s (Visher & Weisburd, 1998). This traditional approach re-
lies on the expertise and tactic knowledge of specialists, which eas-
ily leads to criminal experts’ fatigue, misjudgment, and slow
response. Moreover, it usually lacks of the real data for verification,
thus making it difficult to apply the findings to the actual policy
(Visher & Weisburd, 1998). The second approach deals with the
problem of predicting the crime volume at a specific time and place
using various statistic models (Brown & Oxford, 2001; Gorr,
Olligschlaeger, & Thompson, 2003; Greenberg, 2001; Harries,
2003; Osgood, 2000; Palocsay, Wang, & Brookshire, 2000; Ratcliffe,
2005). Gorr et al. (2003) utilized the Naïve exponential model to
forecast crime one month ahead in Pittsburgh, US. The result dis-
plays that practically any model-based forecasting approach is
vastly more accurate than current police practices. Brown and Ox-
ford (2001) presented baseline models, normal regression, and log-
normal regression to predict the number of breaking and enterings
(B&Es) in the city of Richmond, Virginia and found that log-normal
regression is the best model. Unfortunately, Palocsay et al. (2000)
7109
pointed out that the performance of these statistical models has
been considered weak due to their high error rates and limited
explanatory power. Researchers have thus continued to look for
new improved methods in this arena. In certain applications,
ANN in artificial intelligence has performed at least as well as,
and usually is favorite because it can approximate any nonlinear
function without requiring the specification of a nonlinear model
prior to analyzing the data and can extract hidden knowledge from
vast data and domain experts.
The ANN approach has the capability to simulate thinking of
human brains and has been successfully applied in various areas
due to its salient features in classification, clustering, and rule dis-
covery. Recently, it has been applied to deal with crime knowledge
discovery and achieved impressive results. For instance, Kaza et al.
(2007) integrated association analysis and modified mutual infor-
mation to identify potential criminal vehicles by using law enforce-
ment data from border-area jurisdictions in Tucson, Arizona in the
US. Studying results indicate that the temporal patterns and port
distributions can aid in the better understanding of crossing activ-
ity. Kaikhah and Doddameti (2006) proposed a tool to discover the
existing trends for each type of crime (murder, rape, robbery, auto
theft) in US cities, which used a new training process of neural net-
work. The neural network is modified via pruning hidden layer
activation clustering and is trained to learn the correlations and
relationships that exist in a dataset. They concluded that different
types of crime trend discovery can help monitor the security envi-
ronment. Grubesic (2006) utilized fuzzy clustering to detect the
explanation of criminal activities for crime hot-spot areas and their
spatial trends. Compared with two hard-clustering approaches
(median and k-means clustering problem), the empirical results
suggest that a fuzzy clustering approach is better equipped to han-
dle crime spatial outliers. Using the 24 cases selected from Rich-
mond, Virginia police department, Brown and Hagen (2002)
adopted automated association rule mining methods to help law
enforcement. The results confirm that the association method
can benefit to both the efficiency and accuracy of mining. Other re-
lated works include (Corcoran, Wilson, & Ware, 2003; Oatley &
Ewart, 2003; Oatley, MacIntyre, Ewart, & Mugambi, 2002; Wang
et al., 2002; Xue & Brown, 2003). These all indicate that the discov-
ery of each crime trend with association knowledge provides a
promising solution to the crime problem. Yet, there are still several
important issues worthy of attention. The cases reported in the lit-
erature are mainly concerned with Western advanced capitalist
societies and developing countries (Liu, 2006). Moreover, without
taking into account the uncertainty factor, most aforementioned
models developed can only deal with crisp crime data; thus the
usability of the discovered crime patterns could be limited.
In this paper, we develop an intelligent decision-support model
to uncover the crime patterns and their temporal relationships to
support the police management in law enforcement and duty
deployment. The target data set to be mined was released by
NPA in Taiwan from 2003 to 2004, which is linguistic in nature,
thus a model capable of dealing with fuzzy data is needed. For this,
we propose a new FSOM model and a modified temporal rule
extraction algorithm to be discussed in the next section.
3. Research methodology
This section discusses the underlying research methodologies in
this study.
3.1. The FSOM network
The SOM neural network has been one of the most popular
unsupervised neural network models to solve a wide variety of
7110 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119

problems in clustering, classification, visualization, and modeling operations can be defined in various ways; we restrict ourselves
(Flexer, 2001; Vesanto & Alhoniemi, 2000). It quantizes the input to the well-known operations minimun and maximun.
data and simultaneously performs a topology-preserving projec- With determining the fuzzy similarity measure, the similarity of
tion from the data space onto a regular two-dimensional grid in two fuzzy time series is defined as follows:
the output space (Kohonen, 1997). However, the traditional SOM
SF : Rn ! R
fails to deal with uncertainties. For overcoming such shortcoming,
Huntsberger and Ajjimarangsee (1990) first brought the fuzzy c- 1 X
n
SFð Aei ; Aej Þ ¼ SðAik ; Ajk Þ ð3Þ
means model to enhance the learning rate and weight updating n k¼1
strategy of the fuzzy Kohonen clustering network (FKCN). It was
The node with the largest SF value is assigned as BMU.
then extended by Bezdek, Tsao, and Pal (1992), Tsao, Bezdek, and
Pal (1994), and Lin and Lee (2003) and was applied in various areas
3.1.3. The weight updating process
(Lei & Feihu, 1999). FKCN obtained superior learning performance
During training, neurons that are topographically close to BMU
but could not process linguistic data.
in the map are moved toward a given input vector. It is standard to
In this study, we follow the idea of FKCN and the structure of
use certain geometric distance to update weights in training crisp
traditional SOM to enhance the model to allow for the manipula-
data. Since the crime temporal data is linguistic and represented by
tion of fuzzy numbers as inputs, fuzzy similarity measure, and fuz-
triangular fuzzy sets, the weight updating rule is required in order
zy weight updating. To realize such improvements, three issues
to handle fuzzy numbers.
must be addressed: (1) representation of fuzzy time series, (2)
Let
selection of best-matching unit (BMU), and (3) the weight updating
process. Aei ¼ ½Ai1 ; Ai2 ; . . . ; Aik ; . . . ; Ain 
   l m r  l m r  l m r 
3.1.1. Representation of fuzzy time series ¼ ali1 ; am r
i1 ; ai1 ; ai2 ; ai2 ; ai2 ; . . . ; aik ; aik ; aik ; . . . ; ain ; ain ; ain

The input layer contains n neurons for storing an input fuzzy be a fuzzy input vector and
time series, represented as a fuzzy feature vector Aei ¼
½Ai1 ; Ai2 ; . . . ; Aik ; . . . ; Ain  2 F n in n-dimensional fuzzy number space fj ¼ ½W j1 ; W j2 ; . . . ; W jn 
W
h   
F, where Aik is a non-negative triangular fuzzy number. Formally
¼ wlj1 ; wm r l m r
j1 ; wj1 ; wj2 ; wj2 ; wj2 ; . . . ;
speaking,    i
Aei ¼ ½Ai1 ; Ai2 ; . . . ; Aik ; . . . ; Ain  wljk ; wm r l m r
jk ; wjk ; . . . ; wjn ; wjn ; wjn
   l m r  l m r  l m r 
¼ ali1 ; am r
i1 ; ai1 ; ai2 ; ai2 ; ai2 ; . . . ; aik ; aik ; aik ; . . . ; ain ; ain ; ain be the fuzzy weight vector of BMU. Then the BMU node will move
¼ ½Ai1 ½a; Ai2 ½a; . . . ; Aik ½a; . . . ; Ain ½a toward the input Aei using the so-called ‘‘self-organization” learning
h    rule and its weight vector after updating will be
¼ ALi1 ½a; AUi1 ½a ; ALi2 ½a; AUi2 ½a ; . . . ;
   i f 0 ¼ ½W 0 ; W 0 ; . . . ; W 0 
W
ALik ½a; AUik ½a ; . . . ; ALin ½a; AUin ½a ð1Þ j
h 0
j1 j2 jn
  0 
¼ wlj1 ; wm0 j1 ; w r0
j1 ; wlj2 ; wm0 r0
j2 ; wj2 ; . . . ;
where al, am, and ar are the left, middle, and right bounds of the tri-  0   0 i


angular fuzzy number, Aik ½a ¼ fxlAik ðxÞ P ag is the a-cut set for wljk ; wm0 r0 l m0
jk ; wjk ; . . . ; wjn ; wjn ; wjn
r0



fuzzy number Aik, and ALik ½a ¼ inffxlAik ðxÞ P ag and AUik ½a ¼ where the kth component in the vector is modified according to the
 following updating rule:

supfxlAik ðxÞ P ag are the lower and upper bounds of the a-cut
set for the fuzzy number Aik, respectively.
wl0jk ðt þ 1Þ ¼ wljk ðtÞ þ Dwljk ðtÞ
wm0 m m
jk ðt þ 1Þ ¼ wjk ðtÞ þ Dwjk ðtÞ ð4Þ
3.1.2. Selection of BMU
wr0jk ðt þ 1Þ ¼ wrjk ðtÞ þ Dwrjk ðtÞ
The neurons in the map are fully connected to adjacent ones by
a neighborhood relation of the neurons. When an input vector Aei is The amount of adjustment for each parameter in the triangle fuzzy
presented to the network, the neurons in the map compete with set is then defined as follows:
each other to be the winner (or the best-matching unit, BMU)
Aei  , which is the closest to the input vector in terms of some kind Dwljk ðtÞ ¼ gðtÞðalik ðtÞ  wljk ðtÞÞ
of fuzzy similarity measure due to the nature of fuzziness in the in- Dwm m m
jk ðtÞ ¼ gðtÞðaik ðtÞ  wjk ðtÞÞ ð5Þ
put. A variety of fuzzy similarity measures have been proposed, Dwrjk ðtÞ ¼ gðtÞðarik ðtÞ  wrjk ðtÞÞ
and each has different application domains (Chen & Lu, 2001;
Kuo & Xue, 1998; Paiva & Dourado, 2004). In this paper, we adopt where t = 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . is the time lag, and notation g(t) is the learn-
the Paiva and Dourado’s measure, which is widely used in the lit- ing rate. In general, g(t) is a small positive number decreasing with
 
erature and can be generalized to handle any fuzzy similarity time and can be defined as gðtÞ ¼ g0  exp  t t , where g0 is the
total
measure.
initial rate, t is the current epoch number of training, and ttotal is
Assume that Aik and Ajk are two fuzzy numbers (FN) of the kth
the total training epochs required. The training algorithm of FSOM
component in the feature vector. The similarity measure between
is formalized in Table 1.
two fuzzy numbers (Aik, jk) is defined as follows:
S : FN  FN ! R 3.2. Temporal rule extraction
R
kAik \ Ajk k ðjAik ½a \ Ajk ½ajÞda
SðAik ; Ajk Þ ¼ ¼R ð2Þ The information extraction from time series databases can be
kAik [ Ajk k ðjAik ½a [ Ajk ½ajÞda
divided into four directions: similarity/pattern querying, cluster-
The similarity is basically the result of the division of area of their ing/classification, pattern finding/prediction, and rule extraction
intersection by the area of their union. The Aik \ Ajk and Aik [ Ajk (Cotofrei & Stoffel, 2002). Among them, rule extraction becomes
are the fuzzy t-norm and s-norm operations, respectively. These more important since it can identify the correlation between time
 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119
Table 1
The training algorithm of FSOM network.
[Step 1] Initialize random fuzzy weights of the FSOM, cluster number and
learning rate g0
[Step 2] Select BMU b using Eq. (3)
[Step 3] Update the weights of the neighborhood of BMU using Eqs. (4) and
(5)
[Step 4] Decrease the neighborhood of the winner appropriately using the
following equation
t n 
gðtÞ ¼ g0  expð ttotal Þ
[Step 5] [Step 5] Repeat Steps 2–4 until stopped criterion is not.
series and provide understandable results. Das, Lin, Mannila,
Renganathan, and Smyth (1998) outlined an effective method by
resembling vector quantization for uncovering useful rules from
discretized sequences and represent the rules in the format
if A occurs; then B occurs within time T;
The rules discovered identify the related behavior of patterns
within a sequence over time. Compared to the traditional associa-
tion relation format (Karimi & Hamilton, 2002), we prefer using
simple rules to induce intuitive and significant phenomenon for
experts since rules with multiple candidates and consequents def-
initely decrease the interpretability as well. In this paper, we ex-
tend Das’s algorithm to mine the relationship of two different
crime activities by allowing processing linguistic time series data.
The rule format and extraction algorithm are illustrated as follows.
Given two linguistic temporal crime activities S1 and S2, where
Si = (Li(1), Li(2), . . ., Li(k), . . ., Li(n)), Li(k) e {red, yellow, purple, green,
blue} is the PSI value at time k for Si. Then the relationship between
S1 and S2 is represented as
T¼t
S1 ðLi ðt0 ÞÞ ! S2 ðLj ðt 0 þ tÞÞ:
For example, S1 = (red, purple, yellow, red, green), S2 = (purple, red,
red, purple, red) and the time interval under consideration is T = 1.
The relational rules can be
T¼0 T¼0 T¼0
S1 ðredÞ ! S2 ðpurpleÞ; S1 ðpurpleÞ ! S2 ðredÞ; S1 ðyellowÞ ! S2 ðredÞ;
T¼0 T¼0 T¼1
S1 ðredÞ ! S2 ðpurpleÞ; S1 ðgreenÞ ! S2 ðredÞ; S1 ðredÞ ! S2 ðredÞ;
T¼1 T¼1
S1 ðpurpleÞ ! S2 ðredÞ; S1 ðyellowÞ ! S2 ðpurpleÞ; S1 ðredÞ ! S2 ðredÞ:
T¼1
Repetitive rules need to be pruned and rules below the thresholds
of confidence and support, set by the domain expert, are considered
uninteresting and removed. The support value refers to the percent-
age of task-relevant crime activities for which the pattern is true:
T nðS1 ðLi Þ; S2 ðLj Þ; TÞ
suppðS1 ðLi Þ ) S2 ðLj ÞÞ ¼ pðS1 ðLi Þ \ S2 ðLj ÞT Þ ¼ ð6Þ
nðS1 ðLi ÞÞ
where pðS1 ðLi Þ \ S2 ðLj ÞT Þ is the probability of events of S1(Li) and
S2(Lj)T, n(S1(Li), S2(Lj), T) is the number of occurrences of S1(Li) that
are followed by a S2(Lj) within time interval T.
The confidence is the conditional probability defined by
T
T  suppðS1 ðLi Þ ) S2 ðLj ÞÞ
conf ðS1 ðLi Þ ) S2 ðLj ÞÞ ¼ pðS2 ðLj ÞT S1 ðLi ÞÞ ¼ ð7Þ
pðS1 ðLi ÞÞ
The temporal rule extraction algorithm is detailed in Table 2.
3.3. The J-measure
In general, numerous rules are generated from the temporal
rule extraction algorithm. Although support and confidence are
two typical objective measures in finding interesting rules, some
7111
Table 2
The algorithm of temporal rule extraction.
Rule_set=/;
Si = (Li(1), Li(2), . . ., Li(k), . . ., Li(n)), Li(k) e {red, yellow, purple, green, blue} is the
PSI value at time k in time sequence
h is a time interval under consideration
//Construct all rules of two time series
for t = 0 to h;
for t0 = 1 to (n  t);
o
 T¼t
E ¼ ee ¼ ðS1 ðLi ðt 0 ÞÞ ! S2 ðLj ðt0 þ tÞÞÞ ; // list all rules
Rule_set= Rule_set [E; // remove repetition rules
end
end
//Check thresholds of confidence & support
for each rule Rl e Rule_set
remove Rl from Rule_set if (conf(Rl) < confmin) or (supp(Rl) < suppmin)
return Rule_set;
important information could be lost due to failing to take into ac-
count the frequency of right-hand side of a rule (Harms, Li, Deogun,
& Tadesse, 2002). In order to overcome this shortcoming, Smyth
and Goodman (1992) developed an information-theoretic measure
for evaluating the usefulness of a rule that considered both fre-
quencies of the left and right sides of the rule. This measure is
known as the J-measure and is defined as follows:

pðS2 ðLj ÞT jS1 ðLi ÞÞ
JðS2 ðLj ÞT ; S1 ðLi ÞÞ ¼ pðS1 ðLi ÞÞ  ðpðS2 ðLj ÞT jS1 ðLi ÞÞ log
pðS2 ðLj ÞT Þ
!#
pðS2 ðLj ÞT jS1 ðLi ÞÞ
þ pðS2 ðLj ÞT jS1 ðLi ÞÞ log ð8Þ
pðS2 ðLj ÞT Þ
where p(S1(Li)) is the probability of event S1(Li) occurring in the
temporal crime activities sequence, p(S2(Lj)T) is the probability of
at least one S2(Lj) taking place in a randomly chosen window of
duration time interval T, pðS2 ðLj ÞT jS1 ðLi ÞÞ is the probability of at least
one S2(Lj) occurring in a randomly chosen window of duration time
interval T given that the window is immediately preceded by an
S1(Li), and pðS2 ðLj ÞT jS1 ðLi ÞÞ is the complement of pðS2 ðLj ÞT jS1 ðLi ÞÞ.
For each rule obtained, the higher the J-measure value is, the more
important the rule is.
The J-measure not only provides a useful and sound method for
ranking rules, but also provides a more complex metric in rule
mining and is used in many literatures for handing different rule
discovery problems, such as efficient rule discovery in a geo-spatial
decision support system (Harms et al., 2002), learning fuzzy rule-
based networks for function approximation (Higgins & Goodman,
1992), and incremental learning with rule-based neural networks
(Higgins & Goodman, 1991).
4. Experimental design
Fig. 1 depicts the framework of intelligent decision-support
model for crime prevention, of which crime pattern analysis and
police duty deployment will be discussed in the next section.
4.1. Data acquisition
The data under investigation, provided by the NPA, Taiwan, is
about the monthly crime volume of 20 county police bureaus in
Taiwan from 2003 to 2004. Three counties were intentionally ex-
cluded because they are located in the sparsely populated eastern
area of Taiwan and the crime volume is comparatively too insuffi-
cient to be analyzed. Fourteen criminal categories are collected:
intimidation, drugs, automobile theft, sexual offences, anti-social
behavior, theft, motorcycle theft, firearms crime, damage, force
taking, fraud, robbery, gambling, and injury. Therefore, a set of
7112 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119

Data acquisition Data preprocessing Mining Crime pattern analysis Police duty deployment

Parameter setting Crime trends

Data standardization
Clustering number
Learning rate
x i - x m in Support and confidence of
S i = temporal rule extraction
x m a x - x m in
Crime offenses

Data fuzzification Training FSOM

Crime locations
NPA, Taiwan

Fuzzy clustering
Temporal rule
extraction
Shift around effect

Fig. 1. The framework of intelligent decision-support model for crime prevention.

xij alk au x
280  24 temporal data is constructed, formed by 14 offenses in xij will be lAk ðxij Þ ¼ max min am al
; aukamij ; 0 , where w is a con-
k k k k
each county for over 24 months. stant in [0,1]. After defining the fuzzy sets, the standardized crime
volume xij is converted to one of five lights according to the best
4.2. Data preprocessing matching membership degree (BMD) b which has the largest mem-
bership degree lAk ðxij Þ: lAb ðxij Þ ¼ max ðlAk ðxij ÞÞ. Fig. 2 depicts the
k¼1;2;...;c
Due to the variability existing in crime categories, the monthly
crime volumes are firstly standardized to be a number between 0 derived fuzzy triangle membership functions and fuzzification re-
and 1 using the following formula: sult, where xij is a normalized value.

x  xmin
xij ¼ ð9Þ 4.3. Parameter setting
xmax  xmin
where xmin and xmax are the minimal and maximal of the crime vol- At the mining stage, the FSOM network is trained to cluster the
ume x in a criminal category. fuzzied crime data. During training, parameters of cluster number,
In addition to the crime volume, a public security index of each learning rate, and stopping criterion need to be decided in advance.
crime type is published by NPA which is classified into one of five The stopping criterion is used for justifying whether the training
lights to illustrate the degree of security situation. Such a classifi- model converges or not. There are some reasonable criteria with
cation can be simulated by fuzzification. In this study, the stan- their own practical merits, of which the error-distance, e.g. Euclid-
dardized crime volumes are fuzzied by fuzzy c-means (FCM), ean, measure is simple and widely accepted to measure the differ-
which has been shown as an effective way to help humans deal ence between the cluster center and the input data. In this study,
with uncertainty (Xu & Khoshgoftaar, 2004). The fuzzification since the data set and the cluster centers are fuzzy sets, a defuzz-
process is conducted as follows. Given a data matrix X ¼ ½xij mn , ification procedure is needed to convert the fuzzy set to a crisp real
one firstly converts matrix X into a set S ¼ fx11 ; x12 ; . . . ; x1n ; number. Thus, the error-distance measure is defined as
x21 ; x22 ; . . . ; x2n ; . . . ; xm1 ; xm2 ; . . . ; xmn g. Then, FCM divides S into c vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u n
homogeneous nonempty subsets and obtains c clustering centers 1 uX
Eð Aei ; W
fj Þ ¼ t distðdfuzðAik Þ; dfuzðwjk ÞÞ ð10Þ
(Ck, k = 1, 2, . . ., c) and the corresponding standard deviations n k¼1
(Sk, k = 1, 2, . . ., c). Without loss of generality, the associated trian-
gle fuzzy number Ak can be established Ak ¼ ðC k  w  Sk ; where function ‘dfuz’ is the well-known gravity-based defuzzifica-
 
C k ; C k þ w  Sk Þ ¼ alk ; am u
k ; ak , and the membership degree for datum tion method, in this case, the centroid method.

1
veay bad
0.9 very goog
the membership degree

bad
0.8 intermediate
good
0.7
0.6

0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1

0
-0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5

Fig. 2. Fuzzification process of standardized crime volume.

 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119 7113

The learning rate, a critical parameter in the course of training,
has to be chosen appropriately. Fig. 3 displays the learning curves
with learning rates of 0.0005, 0.001, 0.005, 0.01 and 0.05, where
axes X and Y denote the iteration times and the error-distance,
respectively. It shows that all models achieve good properties of
convergence and stability, nevertheless the model with learning
rate of 0.01 achieves the best performance comparatively. There-
fore, the following experimental analysis is based on the rate in
the FSOM neural network.
The selection of an appropriate number of clusters is usually
problem dependent, and is, in general, based on the principle of
minimizing the inter-distance and maximizing the intra-distance
among clusters. In this study, we consider one of the most popular
cluster validity used in the literature: silhouette width (Li & Kuo,
2008; Rousseeuw, 1987) for determining the cluster numbers.
The silhouette value for each object i is computed in Eq. (11)
bðiÞ  aðiÞ
SðiÞ ¼ ; ð11Þ
maxfaðiÞ; bðiÞg
the second candidate, four clusters, is considered in this
experiment.
Finally, to proceed to temporal rule extraction, a senior detec-
tive with five years experience is consulted for determining the
three parameters of interest: support, confidence, and time interval
T. From the viewpoint of empirical practices, he claims that it is
hard to explain the temporal relations of crimes if time interval
is over two months. Therefore, the parameter T value ranging from
0 to 2 is considered in the experiment and the threshold values of
support and confidence are set to 0.2 and 0.7, respectively.
5. Experimental results, analysis, and discussion
In this section, we analyze and discuss in detail the experimen-
tal results for the aspects of crime patterns, trends and temporal
knowledge rule uncovered.
5.1. Characteristics analysis of crime trend patterns

where a(i) is average dissimilarity of i to all other objects in the
same cluster; b(i) is minimum of average dissimilarity of i to all ob-
jects in other cluster (in the closest cluster). The silhouette width
for a clustering distribution can then be measured by the average
silhouette values for the entire data, which is defined in the
following:
1X n
SW ¼ SðiÞ;
n i¼1
where n is the total number of data items. A higher value of SW indi-
cates better discrimination among clusters and the largest silhou-
ette width indicates the best clustering (number of cluster). To
find the optimal cluster number, numbers from the range of 2–10
are tried as illustrated in Table 3. The best value of silhouette width
is reached around 0.1710 when two clusters are identified. How-
ever, it is meaningless to uncover the trend of two crime categories
that clusters are too few to be subsequently analyzed. As a result,
55
54.5
54
53.5
error
By feeding the 280 crime linguistic time series data into the
FSOM network, four crime trend patterns (clusters) identified. To
justify the clustering result, the one-way analysis of variance (AN-
OVA) is first used to test the significant differences among the four
crime trends at the 95% confidence level. The null hypothesis of
ANOVA was set H0: l1 = . . . = l4 against H1:Not all li(i = 1, . . ., 4)
are equal. The ANOVA summary table for crime trends is listed in
Table 4, which indicates that the critical point for a right-tailed test
ð12Þ at a = 0.05 for an F distribution with 3 and 276 degrees of freedom
is 2.635 and F = 23.04 > F0.05(3,276) = 2.635. Thus, we reject the
null hypothesis and conclude that the means of the four crime
trend patterns are different.
Next, we verify and test the significance of relationships be-
tween two clusters when data are presented as ordered pairs. An
excellent way to measure such relationships is to calculate the
Pearson correlation coefficient and construct a scatter plot. The
null and alternative hypothesis are H0:q = 0 (no correlation) and
H1:q – 0 (significant correlation) in each test and the result show
in Table 5. Because p-value >0.01, we should decide not to reject
the null hypothesis. At the 1% level, there is not enough evidence
to conclude that significant correlations exist between the clusters.
0.0005 This is also verified by the scatter plots in Table 5 in that no linear
0.001
correlation has been observed between the clusters.
0.005
0.01
Table 6 illustrates the characteristics of the mining results of the
0.05 four clusters, which include basic statistical information about the
number of data elements, mean, and variance of the crime offenses
occurring during two contiguous years for each cluster. The fifth
row in the table shows the cluster center, expressed in black dots

53 surrounded by two color curves representing the standard devia-

tion of each time dimension in each cluster. In other words, Table
52.5 6 provides information for the police management to determine

52
Table 4
ANOVA table for crime clusters.
51.5
Source of Sum of Degrees of Mean F
variation squares freedom square ration
51
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 Treatment 1.01657 3 0.3388 23.04
iteration time Error 4.0756 276 0.0147
Total 5.09217 279
Fig. 3. Learning curves of the FSOM network with different learning rates.

Table 3
SW values for different cluster numbers.

Cluster number 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Silhouette widths 0.171 0.1476 0.164 0.1233 0.0802 0.1235 0.0781 0.0813 0.1235
7114 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119

Table 5
Correlation analysis for crime clusters.

Cluster vs. cluster 01 vs. 02 01 vs. 03 01 vs. 04 02 vs. 03 02 vs. 04 03 vs. 04

Pearson correlation 0.503 0.187 0.252 0.185 0.305 0.503
Sig. (2-tailed) 0.012 0.381 0.234 0.388 0.147 0.012
Scatter plot

˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃ˆ
˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃ˆ

˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃ˆ
˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃˅

˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃ˇ

˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃ˇ
˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃ˇ
˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃˅
˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃˄
˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃˄
˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃˄
˶˿̈̆̇˸̅˃˅

Table 6
Patterns of crime trends identified by FSOM.

Cluster 1 Cluster 2 Cluster 3 Cluster 4

Occurrence 55 44 94 87
Mean 0.47 0.50 0.39 0.34
Variance 0.0166 0.0215 0.0211 0.0034
Trend

Label Typical Gradual increase Sharp increase Wintertime

what kind of duty deployment should be applied for each crime of-
fense. Following, we discuss each crime trend in detail.
It is clear that cluster 1, with a 0.47 mean and a 0.0166 variance,
demonstrates that the crime frequency for the first year tends to
gradually increase until it reaches its peak in summer and then de-
crease towards the end of the year, which is also the same pattern
happening during the next year but with a lower number of occur-
rences. This coheres with the fact that more interactions among
people exist during summer period, increasing the chance of crime
commitment (Gorr et al., 2003). The consulting expert in crime of-
fense thus classifies and labels this crime trend as ‘Typical’ pattern.
Cluster 2, with a mean of 0.5 and variance of 0.0215, represents the
cluster with the highest mean and largest variation. The beginning
half period of this trend pattern shows the same tendency of the
Typical pattern but with a slightly later decrease, however the
occurrences in the second half are still high. Thus, the expert sug-
gests that the police management should tackle this problem more
seriously as the crime frequency is still rising. This cluster is there-
fore classified as ‘Gradual Increase’.
Cluster 3, with a mean of 0.39 and variance of 0.0211, clearly
demonstrates an increasing trend during both years and is accord-
ingly labeled as ‘Sharp Increase’. It contains the largest number of
crime occurrences, thus special attention should be paid to this
crime pattern. Finally, cluster 4, with a mean of 0.34 and variance
of 0.0034, achieves the lowest mean and variance, however the
frequency during winter is much higher than in other seasons.
Therefore, the crime occurrences belonging to this cluster are cat-
egorized as wintertime crimes (Gorr et al., 2003) and the pattern
labeled as ‘Wintertime’.
It is worth noting that the occurrences decreased in February
2003 for all cluster patterns, caused by a special annual crime pre-
vention program deployed in Taiwan around the Chinese New Year
period, in which duty deployment was significantly enforced to
improve crime prevention efforts. Typical and Wintertime crime
patterns show stable trends because of the regular high frequency
occurrences during the year. Therefore, the police management
should apply particular crime prevention policies regarding both
types of crime patterns. The resulting strategy helps police man-
agement in carrying on appropriate crime prevention procedures
in the right time and making the best use of the police duty deploy-
ment. In addition, for Gradual Increase and Sharp Increase crime
patterns, the police should dig deep into specific cases to under-
stand the reasons that keep crime frequency constantly rising. This
is the only way that the phenomena stated by the broken window
theory can be avoided.
5.2. Crime offense analysis
Using the clustering results obtained in Section 5.1, we analyze
each of the 14 crime offenses according to their percentage distri-
bution in every cluster. In the analysis process, we first have to find
out which cluster contains the highest percentage of each crime of-
fense and following, we need to determine if this percentage is
higher than the threshold of 40%, set by the senior expert. If it
is larger than the threshold, then we can infer that the trend is
remarkable, otherwise the trend is subordinate remarkable. We
summarize the 14 crime offenses in Fig. 4.
By carefully observing Fig. 4, we can find that motorcycle theft
and injury belong to Typical pattern, occurring mostly in summer.
As we mention in the last section, the occurrences belonging to
Typical pattern are caused by the increased interaction between
people as most people like to partake in outdoor activities during
this season of the year. Injury refers to physical aggression, includ-
ing family violence, street violence, etc., and it is the second most
common crime offense in juvenile delinquency. According to our
analysis, the reason why injury is clustered in Typical pattern is
that teenagers are easily disturbed due to the hot weather condi-
tions during summer, thus increasing the probability of quarrels
and fights. The outcomes obtained from FSOM on Typical pattern
that we proposed in this study happen to agree completely with
the traditional crime theory. Damage is the only remarkable crime
offense in the gradual increase pattern, indicating that the police
management should take this issue more seriously by focusing
more on this type of offense and figuring out an effective way of
preventing it.
The offences in the sharp increase pattern are the most impor-
tant issues that the police should pay attention to because they
continue to rise indefinitely over time. These include theft, drugs,
 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119
Theft Automobile theft
Intimidation Sexual offence
Injury Fraud
80%
40%
0%
Typical pattern Gradual Increase pattern Sharp Increase pattern
Fig. 4. Bar graph of percentage distribution in every cluster.
firearms crime, force taking, and anti-social behavior, which are all
extremely violent offences, indicating seriousness of the situation.
It is evident that the actual prevention policies and police duty
deployments for these crime offenses are not working effectively
as the pattern shows an increasing trend. We strongly recommend
that the police should take notice of this phenomenon and analyze
this situation in more depth. The crime offenses clustered in the
Wintertime pattern all belong to property crimes, such as robbery,
intimidation and gambling, except for sexual offence (Gorr et al.,
2003). Property crimes should be viewed as a representation of of-
fenses that describe material-based criminality in society and usu-
ally happen when the victim is not present. The demand for money
during the period close to the Chinese New Year is the main reason
why people commit property crimes in winter.
The four crime trends obtained from clustering the 14 types of
crime offenses using FSOM model accurately match the actual
crime patterns in Taiwan, so the police should elaborate different
specific strategies according to the characteristics of each of the
four crime trends, paying special attention to both gradual increase
and sharp increase patterns due to their constant increasing trend.
The information we provide is useful for the police to make a better
use of its duty deployment, establish more satisfactory law
enforcement policies, and focus adequately on the crime offenses
that affect the Taiwanese society.
5.3. Analysis of crime location distribution
According to the routine activity theory (RAT) (Ratcliffe, 2002),
crime location is one of the most important factors when analyzing
crime occurrences because it provides a straightforward explana-
tion of the motivation of a crime. RAT indicates that for a crime
to occur, there should be three primary factors: the presence of a
suitable target (place, time and victim), the presence of a possible
offender, and the absence of a suitable guardian to prevent the
crime from happening (Felson & Lawrence, 1980). That is to say,
a crime will not happen if any one of the three primary factors is
eliminated. Therefore, analyzing crime locations and distributions
can help the police discover valuable information regarding the
time and place of the crimes. The police can thus be deployed
appropriately to the right place in the right time to avoid the ab-
sence of a suitable guardian and prevent crimes from happening.
In recent years, due to the improvements in transportation and
communication, lots of recidivists can easily shift around nearby
precincts to repeatedly commit. It is reasonable for criminals to
shift around crime locations to other precincts after the local police
enhance law enforcement duties in their own precincts. Conse-
quently, the recidivists’ shifting pattern of crime locations can be
7115
Motorcycle theft Robbery Force taking
Drugs Firearms crime Gambling
Damage Anti-social behavior
Wintertime pattern
predicted in a systematic way (Johnson & Bower, 2004). It is neces-
sary for the police management to be responsible for each precinct
and to integrate their manpower to prevent the recidivists from
continuing to shift around from a precinct to another. Unfortu-
nately, there still is not an effective inter-precinct duty deploy-
ment. Thus, implementation of an inter-precinct duty
deployment plan will be helpful in preventing recidivists from
shifting around their crime locations and improve police duty
deployment efficiency among every precinct.
After using FSOM model to cluster 14 crime offenses into four
clusters, the experimental results show that the gradual increase
and sharp increase patterns present unusual and dangerous crime
tendencies with a shift around effect. Therefore in order to reduce
and prevent organized crime, we must analyze in more detail these
two patterns occurring in each precinct. We expect to discover
similar crime patterns caused by the shift around effect, thus we
use a visualization method to improve understandability and facil-
itate analysis. Fig. 5 shows Taiwan’s map with the sharp increase
and gradual increase patterns colored in green and purple,
respectively.
As shown in Fig. 5, there is an obvious shift around effect due to
the presence of the same pattern in more than one precinct. This
happens among nearby precincts and even across cities and coun-
ties, proving the existence of the shift around effect. Taking crime
offense damage as an example, we notice that Sharp Increase pat-
tern occurs in two different areas of the island: the northern area
(Taipei county, Taoyuan county, Hsinchu county, and Hsinchu city)
and the central area (Changhua county, Yunlin county, and Chiayi
city). The fact that the same pattern occurs within a single area
indicates the presence of the shift around effect, while the distance
between the northern and central areas reveal the consequences of
the improvements in transportation. The same phenomena hap-
pens with gradual increase pattern, but between the central (Hsin-
chu county and Hsinchu city) and southern (Kaohsiung city,
Kaohsiung county, and Pingtung county) areas of the island. An-
other two special cases are drugs and firearms crime, which both
happen solely in the west coast of the island and only present a
gradual increase pattern. This may be caused by the high popula-
tion density, high economic development among the west coast
cities, and low relative sentence and punishment. Finally, gambling
seems to be almost non-existent along the island, only happening
slightly in Keelung city because it belongs to Wintertime pattern,
which is not considered by the model.
According to the visual analysis, we can specifically confirm the
precincts affected by the shift around effect and help decision mak-
ers in planning the inter-precinct operations to prevent recidivists
from shifting around crime locations. The police can integrate their
7116 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119
Automobile
Intimidation Drugs
theft
Motorcycle
Theft Firearms crime
theft
Fraud Robbery
Fig. 5. Sharp increase and gradual increase pattern distribution in each precinct.
force and at the same time focus their operations on the specific
precincts indicated by our model, thus greatly improving duty
deployment and law establishment.
5.4. Analysis of shift around effect
According to the results of the experiment, gradual increase and
sharp increase patterns showed signs of shift around effect. Das
et al. (1998) indicated the importance of rule discovery and extrac-
tion from time series data, so if rule discovery could be applied to
the data obtained, explicit relational rules among precincts and
crime categories considering time effects could be generated. This
could help enrich understanding of the shift around effect in both
patterns and improve crime prevention operations (Ratcliffe, 2002;
Smyth and Goodman, 1992).
Our research applies temporal linguistic time series rule discov-
ery and J-measure to discover the precincts with serious crime
activities. Each crime offense in each city or county with the shift
around effect is represented by a colored light, which include red,
yellow, purple, green and blue. The first two belong to the most crit-
ical security indexes while the last three are of minor importance,
which is why we focus our analysis on the first two lights, red and
yellow. Finally, we extract 23 crime causal rules with the shift
around effect, shown in Table 7 and Fig. 6.
From the rules obtained shown in Table 7 and Fig. 6, we learn
that the most remarkable crime offenses are automobile theft, mo-
Anti-social
Sexual offense
behavior
Damage Force taking
Gambling Injury
torcycle theft, drugs, firearms crime, injury, anti-social behavior,
and fraud. The two statements within each relational rule present
different locations implying that the crime offense has shifted
around after T months. This proves the existence of the shift
around effect among nearby precincts, or even among distant pre-
cincts due to the improvements in transportation and communica-
tion means. This is further emphasized by the colored arrows in
Fig. 6 that show the shift around distance of each crime offense.
Taking anti-social behavior as an example, the rule
T¼1
The Taichung city is yellow ) The Changhua county is yellow
indicates that Changhua county should deploy duties to prevent
anti-social behavior one month after Taichung city. Another exam-
ple of a crime offense with large shift around effect is fraud, which
is spread all over the island across long distances. A possible expla-
nation is that this crime offense is usually committed by telephone,
originated in big cities where fraud rings are concentrated. In addi-
tion, an interesting phenomenon can be derived from motorcycle
theft crime offense, which shift around effect occurs simultaneously
from Taipei to Hsinchu and vice versa. This indicates the serious-
ness of motorcycle theft in the area and alerts the police to concen-
trate on its prevention.
The large number of rules extracted indicates the seriousness of
the shift around effect of the crime offenses belonging to Gradual
Increase and Sharp Increase patterns. It is essential that the police
 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119 7117

Table 7
Rules of crime offenses with shift around effect.

Crime categories Rule Sup. (%) Con. (%) J-value

Automobile theft T¼2 23 71 0.1698
The Chiayi city is yellow ) The Chiayi county is red
T¼1 22 83 0.1568
The Pingtung county is yellow ) The Changhua county is yellow
Motorcycle theft T¼0 21 83 0.1584
The Taipei county is red ) The Hsinchu county is yellow
T¼0 21 71 0.1383
The Hsinchu county is yellow ) The Taipei county is red
Drugs T¼2 23 71 0.1698
The Pingtung county is yellow ) The Chiayi county is yellow
Firearms crime T¼2 23 71 0.1339
The Changhua county is yellow ) The Yunlin county is yellow
Injury T¼1 22 71 0.0847
The Pingtung county is yellow ) The Yunlin county is yellow
T¼2 23 71 0.0806
The Pingtung county is yellow ) The Hsinchu county is yellow
Anti-social behavior T¼1 26 86 0.1173
The Taichung city is yellow ) The Changhua county is yellow
T¼0 21 83 0.1113
The Taipei city is red ) The Taichung county is red
T¼1 22 71 0.0651
The Taichung city is yellow ) The Taichung county is red
T¼2 23 71 0.0606
The Taichung city is yellow ) The Taichung county is red
T¼2 23 71 0.0439
The Taichung city is yellow ) The Changhua county is yellow
Fraud T¼0 21 83 0.2239
The Changhua county is yellow ) The Kaohsiung county is red
T¼0 21 83 0.1113
The Changhua county is yellow ) The Taipei City is yellow
T¼1 22 71 0.0651
The Kaohsiung City is yellow ) The Taipei City is yellow
T¼1 30 78 0.0549
The Taipei City is yellow ) The Taipei County is yellow
T¼2 23 83 0.0507
The Taipei City is yellow ) The Taipei County is yellow
T¼2 23 83 0.0507
The YiLan County is yellow ) The Taipei County is yellow
T¼0 25 75 0.0436
The Kaohsiung County is yellow ) The Taipei County is yellow
T¼0 21 71 0.0277
The Taoyuan County is yellow ) The Taipei County is yellow
T¼0 21 71 0.0277
The Tainan County is yellow ) The Taipei County is yellow
T¼1 22 71 0.0235
The Kaohsiung City is yellow ) The Taipei County is yellow

Fig. 6. Visualization of crime offenses with red and yellow lights. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version
of this article.)

deploy preventive operations to put a stop to these crime offenses, they are confronted becomes an important issue to consider. Tak-
but under the limited amount of police force, the order in which ing anti-social behavior as an example, the rule
7118 S.-T. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 7108–7119
T¼1
The Taichung city is yellow ) The Taichung county is red
has a J-measure value of 0.0651, while the rule
T¼2
The Taichung city is yellow ) The Taichung county is red
has a J-measure value of 0.0606, indicating that the first rule should
be considered before the second due to its higher J-measure value.
This is reasonable because the first rule’s time interval is smaller,
being of better accordance with the fact that the shift around effect
occurs between short intervals of time. Considering distance as a
factor, the rule
T¼1
The Taichung city is yellow ) The Changhua county is yellow
has a J-measure value of 0.1173, while the rule
T¼0
The Taipei city is red ) The Taichung county is red
has a J-measure value of 0.1113, indicating that the first rule should
be considered first. This is logical because the distance between Tai-
chung city and Changhua county is smaller than the distance be-
tween Taipei city and Taichung county, which coincides with the
fact that the shift around effect is more prompt to happen between
nearby precincts.
Therefore, by using crime rules and J-measure ranking, the po-
lice can more accurately predict the location and time of the shift
around effect of the crime occurrences, substantially reducing the
scope of investigation and effectively allocating its force.
5.5. Strategy-making of police duty deployment
In general, there are two kinds of strategies of police duty
deployment. The first consists of deploying the routine duties
every precinct needs within itself, while the second consists of spe-
cial duties conducted by the NPA, Headquarter of Police Affairs in
Taiwan, across all precincts simultaneously for the same goals
(e.g. special duties for robbery prevention). The main purpose of
routine duties is to prevent the occurrence of crimes belonging
to Typical and Wintertime patterns, which tendencies are regular
and predictable within all precincts. On the other hand, special du-
ties are applied by deploying the same operations at the same time
in every precinct to prevent crimes belonging to gradual increase
and sharp increase patterns because they present shift around ef-
fect. However, special duties usually cannot endure for long peri-
ods of time because of the great consumption of police duty
force. Therefore, crime frequency will drop during periods with
special duties but will rise again after they end. In other words,
special duties can only combat crimes temporarily and cannot
solve the root of the problem.
Moreover, Johnson and Bower (2004) indicated that offenders
usually do not target the same neighborhoods but prefer to change
target areas in order to reduce the risks of being caught. It is a great
necessity to discover the precincts with serious public security sit-
uations and deploy inter-precinct special duties only to those
neighborhood precincts with shift around effects for longer periods
of time. We did particular mining for special duties by crime loca-
tion analysis and rule analysis, and furthermore illustrated the de-
tailed managerial guidance of the four critical clusters of crime
patterns. According to our managerial duty guidance, patterns with
shift around effect including gradual increase and sharp increase
should employ special operations focused only on the specific pre-
cincts appearing in the causal rules. For example, to combat injury,
coordination of forces between Pingtung county, Yunlin county,
and Hsinchu county would placate the need for the NPA because
the latter would perform special duties covering the whole island,
leading to a waste of resources. Consequently, our research elicits
implicit knowledge of great importance that can help improve po-
lice duty deployment’s efficiency and prevent shift around effect,
which has been ignored up to now.
6. Conclusions and future works
The society we live in is a complicated and culturally revolu-
tionized one, where crime problems are rising in an endless stream
and their prevention has become a first priority for the police and
the government. In this paper, we apply technologies in knowledge
discovery in public security index requirement of linguistic data to
support decision making for planning police duty deployment.
During the process of knowledge discovery we use the FSOM neu-
ral network to uncover crime patterns from data of the crime vol-
ume in Taiwan provided by the NPA. We then apply temporal
linguistic time series rule discovery and J-measure to identify the
precincts with prominent crime activity and work out a critical va-
lue to determine the relative seriousness of the crimes in each
precinct.
According to the analysis of the experimental results, we were
able to discover the characteristics of four crime patterns, namely
typical, gradual increase, sharp increase, and Wintertime, which
provide information for the police management to determine the
kind of duty deployment that should be applied for each type of
crime offense. This allows for a better usage of the police force and
prevents time and other resources from being wasted when the re-
sources employed are not suitable for the occasion. Statistical tests
(ANOVA and Pearson correlation coefficient) support our findings by
showing that the four crime trends are significantly different, mean-
ing that the four clusters accordingly represent the four different
crime patterns. In addition, by observation and careful analysis we
noticed that Gradual Increase and Sharp Increase patterns show a
constant increase, so we paid special attention to them and did fur-
ther study to find out which crime offenses were more remarkable
in each pattern and their respective locations. We also found out
that many of them did not happen in a single precinct, but were ex-
tended to neighboring precincts, indicating the presence of a shift
around effect. In this way, we could improve understandability
and facilitate analysis to help decision makers in planning the in-
ter-precinct operations to prevent recidivists from shifting around
in crime locations. The rules inferred from the data lead to recogni-
tion of hidden relationships between crime offenses and locations,
and combined with a J-measure value, they facilitated the identifica-
tion of the shift around effect. This allowed a better and more accu-
rate prediction of the location and time of the shift around effect of
the crime occurrences, helping the police to counteract criminal acts
more effectively and efficiently. Moreover, it is worth mentioning
that the FSOM neural clustering model can be applied to various
application domains that deal with vast amounts of linguistic data.
One limitation of the current study is the difficulty of evaluating
the accurate performance of the proposed model, so future works
could be aimed at finding a way to use quantified methods to eval-
uate the degree of crime reduction achieved, the improvement in
duty deployment, and the impact on society. Moreover, due to
the availability of the crime data, the experiment was conducted
using data that covered a span of two years. If the period under
consideration could be increased, it would provide more longevity
to the results obtained.
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