
Predicting Crime Using Twitter and Kernel Density Estimation [pdf] - jcr
http://ptl.sys.virginia.edu/ptl/sites/default/files/manuscript_gerber.pdf
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xamdam
Interesting, but would this do any better than using real crime data, such as
geolocated data police departments have already?

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gwern
Even if it did worse, it could still be useful. It's common in statistical
modeling that a bad model can be combined with a good model to make an even
better model, and a whole ensemble of bad models can be a good model. As long
as they are drawing on different data sources or are interpreting the data
differently, their errors will not be exactly the same, and so they can be
combined to get better results. In this case, Twitter seems like a rather
different set of data than the historical crime records police departments
presumably are using, and so it might be useful.

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girvo
That concept is similar to the whole "wisdom of the crowd" thing, isn't it?
Interesting.

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gwern
Yes, wisdom-of-the-crowds or Condorcet's jury theorem are very similar.

(Now that I think about it more, there's also a lot of potential advantages to
Twitter: global coverage, uniform data access, less risk of 'juking the
numbers', less criteria drift over time... Yes, maybe local police records are
much better, but you could spend a lifetime trying to get copies of them and
putting them into the same data format and reconciling differing definitions
etc.)

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comrh
Wouldn't most of the information pulled just be news stations tweeting reports
of crime though?

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shiggerino
Wonder how their system would deal with #SandyLootCrew

