A comparative study of classification algorithms using data mining: Crime and accidents in Denver City the USA

In the last five years, crime and accidents rates have increased in many cities of America. The advancement of new technologies can also lead to criminal misuse. In order to reduce incidents, there is a need to understand and examine emerging patterns of criminal activities. This paper analyzed crime and accident datasets from Denver City, USA during 2011 to 2015 consisting of 372,392 instances of crime. The dataset is analyzed by using a number of Classification Algorithms. The aim of this study is to highlight trends of incidents that will in return help security agencies and police department to discover precautionary measures from prediction rates. The classification of algorithms used in this study is to assess trends and patterns that are assessed by BayesNet, NaiveBayes, J48, JRip, OneR and Decision Table. The output that has been used in this study, are correct classification, incorrect classification, True Positive Rate (TP), False Positive Rate (FP), Precision (P), Recall (R) and Fmeasure (F). These outputs are captured by using two different test methods: k-fold cross-validation and percentage split. Outputs are then compared to understand the classifier performances. Our analysis illustrates that JRip has classified the highest number of correct classifications by 73.71% followed by decision table with 73.66% of correct predictions, whereas OneR produced the least number of correct predictions with 64.95%. NaiveBayes took the least time of 0.57 sec to build the model and perform classification when compared to all the classifiers. The classifier stands out producing better results among all the classification methods. This study would be helpful for security agencies and police department to discover data patterns and analyze trending criminal activity from prediction rates.