A book I made contributions to, SPSS Statistics for Data Analysis and Visualization, is currently out. Keith and Jesus are the main authors of the book, but I contributed one chapter and Jon Peck contributed a few.

The book is a guided tour through many of the advanced statistical procedures and data visualizations in SPSS. Jon also contributed a few chapters towards using syntax, python, and using extension commands. It is a very friendly walkthrough, and we have all contributed data files for you to be able to follow along through the chapters.

So there is alot of content, but I wanted to give a more specific details on my chapter, as I think they will be of greater interest to crime analysts and criminologists. I provide two case studies, one of using geospatial association rules to identify areas of high crime plus high 311 disorder complaints in DC (using data from my dissertation). The second I give an example of spatio-temporal forecasting of ShotSpotter data at the weekly level in DC using both prior shootings as well as other prior Part 1 crimes.

Geospatial Association Rules

The geospatial association rules is a technique for high dimensional contingency tables to find particular combinations among categories that are more prevalent. I show examples of finding that thefts from motor vehicles tend to be associated in places nearby graffiti incidents.

And that assaults tend to be around locations with more garbage complaints (and as you can see each has a very different spatial patterning).

I consider this to be a useful exploratory data analysis type technique. It is very similar in application to conjunctive analysis, that has prior very similar crime mapping applications in risk terrain modeling (see Caplan et al., 2017).

Spatio-Temporal Prediction

The second example case study is forecasting weekly shootings in fairly small areas (500 meter grid cells) using ShotSpotter data in DC. I also use the prior weeks reported Part 1 crime types (Assault, Burglary, Robbery, etc.), so it is similar to the leading indicators forecasting model advocated by Wilpen Gorr and colleagues. I show that prior shootings predict future shootings up to 5 lags prior (so over a month), and that the prior crimes do have an effect on future shootings (e.g. robberies in the prior week contribute to more shootings in the subsequent week).

If you have questions about the analyses, or are a crime analyst and want to apply similar techniques to your data always feel free to send me an email.