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Statistical Methods for Crime Series Linkage

NCJ Number
249227
Author(s)
Michael D. Porter
Date Published
September 2015
Length
10 pages
Annotation
The crimelinkage package is a set of tools to help crime analysts and researchers with tasks related to crime linkage.
Abstract

This package specifically includes methods for criminal case linkage, crime series identification and clustering, and suspect identification. The object of the crimelinkage package is to provide a statistical approach to criminal linkage analysis that discovers and groups crime events that share a common offender and prioritizes suspects for further investigation. Bayes factors are used to describe the strength of evidence that two crimes are linked. Using concepts from agglomerative hierarchical clustering, the Bayes factors for crime pairs can be combined to provide similarity measures for comparing two crime series. This facilitates crime series clustering, crime series identification, and suspect prioritization.

Date Published: September 1, 2015