Towards hour-level crime prediction: A neural attentive framework with spatial–temporal-categorical fusion

Abstract As one of the most complex social problems around the world, crime may bring the risk of dying or losing property to the public if not handled properly. Crime prediction which aims at predicting crime incidents before they happen is of great importance to fight against crime. Previous studies are concerned primarily with day-level crime prediction and have certain limitations on modeling complex spatial–temporal-categorical dependency contained in the criminal activities as well as utilizing external factors to facilitate the forecast. In this paper, we develop a novel Neural Attentive framework for Hour-level Crime prediction (NAHC) to cope with these challenges. Specifically, we first adopt the priori knowledge-based data enhancement strategy to alleviate the zero-inflated issue raised in hour-level settings. Then, multi-graph convolutional networks are applied to capture spatial dependency from different aspects. After that, we integrate gated recurrent units with a temporal attention mechanism to jointly address temporal dependency and capture time-sensitive external factors. A categorical attention mechanism is proposed for dealing with categorical dependency and finally a fully connected network is utilized to generate the final prediction results. Extensive experiments on two real-world crime datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework over the state-of-the-art comparing methods.