A multivariate time series clustering approach for crime trends prediction

In recent past, there is an increased interest in time series clustering research, particularly for finding useful similar trends in multivariate time series in various applied areas such as environmental research, finance, and crime. Clustering multivariate time series has potential for analyzing large volume of crime data at different time points as law enforcement agencies are interested in finding crime trends of various police administration units such as states, districts and police stations so that future occurrences of similar incidents can be overcome. Most of the traditional time series clustering algorithms deals with only univariate time series data and for clustering high dimensional data, it has to be transformed into single dimension using a dimension reduction technique. The conventional time series clustering techniques do not provide desired results for crime data set, since crime data is high dimensional and consists of various crime types with different weight age. In this paper, a novel approach based on dynamic time wrapping and parametric Minkowski model has been proposed to find similar crime trends among various crime sequences of different crime locations and subsequently use this information for future crime trends prediction. Analysis on Indian crime records show that the proposed technique generally outperforms the existing techniques in clustering of such multivariate time series data.