A Revised Frequent Pattern Model for Crime Situation Recognition Based on Floor-Ceil Quartile Function

Identifying related offences in a criminal investigation is an important goal for crime analysts. This can deliver evidence that can assist in apprehension of suspects and better attribution of past crimes. The use of pattern based approaches has the potential to assist crime experts in discovering new patterns of criminal activity. Hence, research in this area continues. This paper revisits frequent pattern growth models for crime pattern mining. Frequent pattern (FP) based approaches, such as the FP-Growth model, have been identified to be more effective than techniques proposed in the past, such as Apriori. Therefore, this research proposes a descriptive statistical approach, based on a quartile (floor-ceil) function, for the minimum support threshold (MST) choice selection, which is a major decision step in the pruning phase of the Traditional FP-Growth (TFPG) model. Our revised frequent pattern growth (RFPG) model further proposes a Pattern-pattern (Pp) paradigm to identify tuples of subtle crime pattern(s) sequences or recurring trends in criminal activity. We present empirical results in order to guide intended audience about future decisions or research regarding this model. Results indicate that RFPG is more promising than TFPG and will always ensure the utilisation of a reasonable percentage of the crime dataset, in order to produce more reliable and sufficiently informative patterns or trends.