A review of data mining applications in crime

Crime continues to remain a severe threat to all communities and nations across the globe alongside the sophistication in technology and processes that are being exploited to enable highly complex criminal activities. Data mining, the process of uncovering hidden information from Big Data, is now an important tool for investigating, curbing and preventing crime and is exploited by both private and government institutions around the world. The primary aim of this paper is to provide a concise review of the data mining applications in crime. To this end, the paper reviews over 100 applications of data mining in crime, covering a substantial quantity of research to date, presented in chronological order with an overview table of many important data mining applications in the crime domain as a reference directory. The data mining techniques themselves are briefly introduced to the reader and these include entity extraction, clustering, association rule mining, decision trees, support vector machines, naive Bayes rule, neural networks and social network analysis amongst others.