Geographic profiling with event prediction

Studies have shown that the target preference of a serial criminal is dependent upon the distance he or she must travel from their residence to the target. Further research has identified this relationship as the journey to crime theory. This theory states that a criminal´s propensity to commit crime decreases exponential with increasing distance from their home. This paper combines the journey to crime theory along with other geographic profiling methodologies with spatial crime forecasting methodologies to produce a unique geographic profiling methodology. In this methodology, a density surface representing the likelihood of future crime occurrence at each point in the sample space is calculated using locations and location features of previous events of a serial offender. The forecasted density surface is then used to simulate a complete crime surface, where every point in the sample space is considered a crime point of varying degree. The method then models a residence likelihood surface using a density function that accounts for distance to every point in the sample space and the forecasted density score of each of these future crimes.