How Emergent Self Organizing Maps Can Help Counter Domestic Violence

Topographic maps are an appealing exploratory instrument for discovering new knowledge from databases. During the past years, new types of self organizing maps (SOM) were introduced in the literature, including the recent emergent SOM. The ESOM is used to study a large set of police reports describing a whole range of violent incidents that occurred during the year 2007 in the police region Amsterdam-Amstelland (the Netherlands). It is demonstrated that it provides an exploratory search instrument for examining unstructured text in police reports. First, it is shown how the ESOM was used to discover a whole range of new features that better distinguish domestic from non-domestic violence cases. Then, it is demonstrated how this resulted in a significant improvement in classification accuracy. Finally, the ESOM is showcased as a powerful instrument for the domain expert interested in an in-depth investigation of the nature and scope of domestic violence.