Open Access Library Journal

2023, Volume 10, e9685

ISSN Online: 2333-9721
ISSN Print: 2333-9705

Using Data-Mining to Solve Crimial Cases

Tongxing Li, Yongfeng Zhang, Jiaojiao Zhao, Hui Zhang

School of Mathematics and Statistics, Taishan University, Tai’an, China

How to cite this paper: Li, T.X., Zhang, Abstract

Y.F., Zhao, J.J. and Zhang, H. (2023) Using
Data-Mining to Solve Crimial Cases. Open Crime is a serious social problem, which affects the improvement of the qual-
Access Library Journal, 10: e9685. ity of life and the development of social economy. Under the background of
https://doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1109685
the information age, how to effectively use the collected large amount of crime
Received: December 14, 2022
data to analyze and predict crime is particularly important. Data-mining can
Accepted: February 6, 2023 extract implicit, unknown and potentially valuable information from a large
Published: February 9, 2023 number of original data. This paper studies how to use data-mining to ana-
lyze the intelligence value behind massive data, which has important refer-
Copyright © 2023 by author(s) and Open
Access Library Inc.
ence value for the construction of crime detection and control model.
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International Subject Areas
License (CC BY 4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Search and Mining, Criminology
Open Access
Keywords
Data-Mining, Link Analysis, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

1. Introduction
The well-known methods and tools used in data-mining include link analysis,
such as looking for gangs and other forms of links between criminals or terror-
ists; software agents are small and independent computer program fragments that
can monitor, collect, analyze and act on information; machine learning is algo-
rithms that can infer the contour characteristics of crime and the distribution map
of crime; neural network is a special kind of computer program, which can pre-
dict the probability of crime or terrorist attack. Geometric clustering is a special
form of link analysis [1]. In the era of big data, a major difficulty in predicting
crime is how to accurately and effectively analyze a large number of crime data. In
addition to the basic information mastered by the police, it also involves the in-
formation of relevant industries such as network, communication, finance and
transportation, as well as the relevant social information such as e-commerce,

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 T. X. Li et al.

logistics and transportation, social services, and so on. How to integrate massive
information and find valuable clues is very important.
In the following, based on big data mining technology, we give four effective
ways to analyze criminal activities. The innovation of the paper is the general
theory of “Link analysis”, “Geometric clustering”, “Software agent” and “Soft-
ware agent” were introduced and the relative theory of the methods used in the
data-mining to solve criminal cases is introduced. However, due to the difficulty
in obtaining judicial data, the analysis of some cases using data-mining will ap-
pear in future articles.

2. Link Analysis
Link analysis, also known as “point connection”, is one of many branches under
the heading of data-mining. Data-mining is to obtain useful information from a
large amount of public data that can be provided by modern society. Link analy-
sis is mainly the process of tracking the relationship between people, places and
organizations. These links may be business relationships, criminal partnerships,
family ties, direct meetings, financial transactions, e-mail exchanges, and so on.
Link analysis plays an important role in the fight against terrorism, organized
and purposeful crime, money laundering and telephone fraud, especially.
Link analysis is a human expert driven process. Mathematics and technology
provide human experts with flexible and powerful computing tools, which
makes it easier to reveal, track and study possible connections. Those programs
generally allow analysts to form connected data into a network that can be dis-
played on the computer screen for research. Nodes on the network represent in-
terested individuals, places and organizations, and connections between nodes
represent relationships or transactions. This tool also allows analysts to investi-
gate and record the details of each connection, and find new nodes associated
with existing nodes or new connections between existing nodes.
In the investigation of a suspected criminal group, investigators can link up
the phone calls that the suspects have played or receive, analyze the number of
calls, phone records, the duration and duration of each call, or the next dialing
number. Then investigators can decide to follow up the phone network to see
who the phone is calling from and who they are from, to see who had previously
talked to the original suspect. Through this investigation, investigators can pay
attention to those who did not pay attention before. Some of them are likely to
be proven innocent, but others may be proven to be accomplices or accomplices
of criminals. Another investigation path is to track the cash flow between do-
mestic and foreign bank accounts of suspected criminal groups.
Another path is to analyze the network composed of people and places visited
by suspects. Such as the records of purchasing air tickets, train tickets and en-
try-exit ports in and out of a specific country, credit card shopping records, car
rental records, records of accessing websites and such data.
In today’s society, it is almost difficult for anything to leave electronic traces.
The challenge of link analysis is usually not insufficient data, but how to select

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what effective information from millions of data for further analysis. Link analy-
sis can play an important role when supported by other types of information,
such as relevant information from potential suspects’ neighbors or useful infor-
mation provided by police informants. The advantage of link analysis is that
once the initial link analysis has identified a possible criminal or terrorist net-
work, it can determine the key people suspected of crime by studying who these
people have the most contact with in the network.

3. Geometric Clustering
Under the condition of limited resources, law enforcement departments usually
devote most of their energy to solving major criminal cases, but some small il-
legal cases are easy to be ignored. However, if a criminal gang or individual reg-
ularly creates similar cases for many times and accumulates to a certain number,
it will become a major criminal activity, which will attract the special attention
of the police. How to find out which are the serial crimes of a group or individu-
al from the large number of minor violations that occur every day is extremely
significant.
In the case of distraction theft, generally, one person appears around a house
owner, pretends to be some kind of staff to communicate with the house owner,
and another person quickly sneaks into the apartment or room to steal. Such
victims usually call the police, and the police officers in charge of peripheral in-
vestigation will go to the victim’s house to listen to the statement. Because one of
the perpetrators has communicated for a long time to attract the attention of the
homeowner, the victim’s statement often contains more details, including gend-
er, body shape, height, approximate age, face, accent, special accessories, number
and gender of partners, etc. This valuable information makes the criminal cases
of this nature very effective for data-mining judgment. It can determine that this
group of cases is related to a criminal gang, and it also plays a key role in the
analysis of using geometric clustering technology.
When we really use data-mining to practice, we need to face more complex
situations. First of all, most of the content of the description of the offender is
recorded by the police officer in charge of the investigation in the form of narra-
tive statements when listening to the statement of the perpetrator. It is necessary
to use text-mining technology to transform such description into an organized
form. In practice, there are many limitations in the available text-mining soft-
ware, which often requires manual input to process a considerable number of
records. After some initial analysis, researchers usually focus the main informa-
tion on eight variables: height, body shape, age, race, hair length, hair color, ac-
cent and number of associates. Once the data is processed into an organized for-
mat, then geometric clustering is used to divide the description of criminals into
several sets, which may point to the same person.
Specifically, the above eight variables are numerically coded in turn. Height
may give an approximate height (meters) or a range, or words such as “medium”,

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 T. X. Li et al.

“high” and “short”, which requires some strategy to convert its corresponding into
a single number. Age is often estimated and can be recorded as a number or a
range. Gender is male or female, usually coded as 1 or 0. Similarly, some schemes
need to be designed to express the remaining variables in digital form. After the
numerical coding is completed, an eight dimensional vector is used to describe
each perpetrator. At this time, the coordinates of a point in an eight dimensional
Euclidean geometric space are the characteristics of a perpetrator. Using the de-
scription of the distance between two points in Euclidean space, in the sense of
this measurement, the next point corresponds to the approximate common cha-
racteristics in the description of the perpetrator; The closer the distance is, the
closer the point is, the more common features are described. At this time, the
distance between Euclidean two points is given by:

( x1 − y1 ) + ( x2 − y2 ) +  + ( x8 − y8 ) (1)
2 2 2
d=

The key point is how to identify the clustering of adjacent points. If there are
only two variables, mark all points on a plan with only x and y coordinates, and
the possible clustering can be seen by visual inspection. Unfortunately, it is quite
difficult to find clusters in an eight-dimensional space. The effective method is
to transform the array of points in the eight-dimensional space into a two-di-
mensional matrix, that is, arrange all data points into a two-dimensional grid.
The arrangement rules are as follows:
1) Place a pair of adjacent points in the eight-dimensional space into the same
grid;
2) Any pair of adjacent points in the grid are also adjacent in the eight-di-
mensional space;
3) Points that are far away in the grid are also far away in eight-dimensional
space.
In practice, we can use Kohonen self-organizing map in neural network to ar-
range the data according to the above rules. After the data is input into the grid,
the law enforcement personnel analyze the grid box. These data may come from
a criminal gang responsible for this series of cases. At the same time, it can
simply identify the clusters on the grid, which is likely to represent the activities
of criminal gangs. Therefore, in both cases, the police can analyze the table value
of the corresponding case statement and dig out the cases that are actually com-
mitted by a gang.
The disadvantage of geometric clustering is that the initial digital coding of
case table value may not be standard. Therefore, when using the distance of
eight-dimensional vector in Euclidean space to cluster table values, the size of
one variable may play a major role, while the size of other variables has little ef-
fect. The scaling of each variable is an improvement in the process of normaliza-
tion. Another problem is how to deal with the missing data, that is, how to clus-
ter if there are missing (blank) entries. Missing data is one of the biggest ob-
stacles in data-mining. Usually, if there are only a few such cases, the secondary
entries can be directly ignored.

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4. Software Agent
In essence, software agent is a specific computer program designed to achieve a
set goal. When operating environment changes, the program will respond inde-
pendently. Software agent can make various operations according to different
input instructions in a certain range. It is one of the specific applications of ar-
tificial intelligence. For special types of criminal cases, it is impossible for the po-
lice to collect a large amount of data and analyze the results, so as to detect the
sudden change of the situation and respond as soon as possible. Therefore, it
must be assisted by software. Usually, the countermeasure used in practice is to
develop a coordination system of multiple agent software, in which each agent
software communicates with each other, and each agent software is set to com-
plete a specific subtask. The coordination system mainly includes the following
commonly used agent software:
1) Agent software that extracts and modifies data from different data.
2) Agent software that collects potentially relevant data from different data-
bases.
3) Agent software that analyzes the data and find abnormal patterns for spe-
cific events.
4) Agent software for classification and identification of abnormal conditions.
5) Agent software that provides alerts to law enforcement personnel in an
emergency.

5. Machine Learning
Machine learning is another important application of artificial intelligence. It is
the most effective in data-mining technology when it is used for the contour
analysis of criminals. The effectiveness of algorithms in machine learning is that
they can automatically find and identify the key features in the sea volume data.
Specially trained staff can also do fine identification and classification, but they
can only process a small amount of data at a time, while machine learning can
process a large amount of data, so as to save a lot of manpower and material re-
sources.
Computer can make scientific decisions without human intervention through
machine learning. It has been successfully applied in the fields of speech recog-
nition, auto-driving, network search, and so on. Using machine learning, crime
can be predicted based on historical reference data, so as to make up for the
shortcomings of the traditional crime governance model, and open up a new
concept of crime governance. Using machine learning to predict crime has be-
come a research hotspot abroad, but domestic research in this field has just be-
gun. The prediction process of crime by machine learning generally includes da-
ta collection, data classification, pattern recognition, prediction process and data
visualization. Machine learning can use unstructured data and structured data
for pattern recognition. Structured data is mainly used for association analysis,
classification and prediction, cluster analysis and outlier analysis. Common ma-

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 T. X. Li et al.

chine learning algorithms include reinforcement learning, semi supervised learn-

ing, unsupervised learning and supervised learning. Classification is an impor-
tant application of machine learning algorithm in crime prediction. Its process
includes two stages: using training set to train classifier and prediction results. It
is very effective to predict crime hotspots and crime types through classification.

6. Summary
Data-mining technology is usually used to efficiently explore the hidden patterns
in a large number of crime data. By continuously improving the efficiency of crime
data-mining, the accuracy of crime prediction can be improved accordingly. In
[2] [3] [4] [5], in order to get an ideal crime prediction model and give a satis-
factory conclusion of crime data analysis, so as to predict crime more accurately,
we need enough historical data to train and optimize the model. In [6], it is pointed
out that unfortunately, in the process of practice, the occurrence of criminal cases
is often affected by a variety of factors, and each crime prediction model has cer-
tain disadvantages. A large number of updated crime data cannot be summarized
and integrated in real time, and the prediction object is uncontrollable. Research-
ers need to put forward more improved and optimized algorithms and crime
prediction models to improve the accuracy of crime prediction [7] [8] [9] [10].

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the associate editor and the reviewers for their
constructive comments and suggestions which improved the quality of the pa-
per. This work was supported by the Support Plan on Science and Technology
for Youth Innovation of Universities in Shandong Province (2021KJ086).

Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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