Effects of Data Quality on Predictive Hotspot Mapping

The purpose of the current research was to contribute to the improved robustness of predictive crime mapping techniques. Our goal was to investigate the effect of data quality on predictive hotspot mapping analysis in order to achieve the following three objectives: 1. Determine empirical descriptions of the quality of a range of “typical” geocoding techniques employed in crime mapping, including their completeness, positional accuracy and repeatability; 2. Characterize the effects of data quality on the robustness of selected predictive crime hotspot mapping techniques; and 3. Determine the effects of analysis method, crime type, urban morphology and parameter settings for predictive crime hotspot mapping techniques given a range of typical data quality parameters within the context of the accuracy and precision of hotspot prediction. The current study analyzed over 400,000 crime incident records from six large law enforcement jurisdictions in the U.S.