I have two recent working papers out:

• National Institute of Justice Recidivism Forecasting Challenge Team “MCHawks” Performance Analysis (Circo & Wheeler, 2021)
• The Impact of COVID-19 on the Spatial Distribution of Shooting Violence in Buffalo, NY (Drake et al., 2021)

The NIJ forecasting paper is the required submission by NIJ. Gio and I will likely try to turn this into a real paper in the near future. I’d note George Mohler and Michael Porter did the same thing as us, clip the probabilities to under 0.5 to win the fairness competition.

NIJ was interested in “what variables are the most important” – I will need to slate a longer blog post about this in the future, but this generally is not the right way to frame predictive challenges. You do not need real in depth understanding of the underlying system, and many times different effects can be swapped out for one another (e.g. Dawes, 1979).

The paper on shootings in Buffalo is consistent with my blog posts on shootings in NYC (precincts, grid cells). Even though shootings have gone up by quite a bit in Buffalo overall, the spatial distribution is very consistent over time. Appears similar to a recent paper by Jeff Brantingham and company as well.

It is a good use case for the differences in SPPT results when adjusting for multiple comparisons, we get a S index of 0.88 without adjustments, (see below distribution of p-values). These are consistent with random data though, so when doing a false discovery rate correction we have 0 areas below 0.05.

If you look at the maps there are some fuzzy evidence of shifts, but it is quite weak overall. Also one thing I mention here is that even though we have hot spots of shootings, even the hottest grid cells only have 1 shooting a month. Not clear to me if that is sufficient density (if only considering shootings) to really justify a hot spots approach.

References

• Brantingham, P. J., Carter, J., MacDonald, J., Melde, C., & Mohler, G. (2021). Is the recent surge in violence in American cities due to contagion?. Journal of Criminal Justice, 76, 101848.
• Circo, G., & Wheeler, A. (2021). National Institute of Justice Recidivism Forecasting Challenge Team “MCHawks” Performance Analysis. CrimRxiv. https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.9aa2c75a
• Dawes, R. M. (1979). The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making. American Psychologist, 34(7), 571.
• Drake, G., Wheeler, A., Kim, D.-Y., Phillips, S. W., & Mendolera, K. (2021). The Impact of COVID-19 on the Spatial Distribution of Shooting Violence in Buffalo, NY. CrimRxiv. https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.e187aede
• Mohler, G., & Porter, M. D. (2021). A note on the multiplicative fairness score in the NIJ recidivism forecasting challenge. Crime Science, 10(1), 1-5.