A Bayesian Hierarchical Model for Criminal Investigations
This work addresses threat assessment for law enforcement in criminal investigations, but it appears incremental as it customizes an existing Bayesian hierarchical model to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of assessing the threat posed by potential violent criminals during their preparatory escalation process by customizing a three-level Bayesian hierarchical model to propagate evidence in real time and calibrate to domain expert judgments, with a hypothetical example based on a potential vehicle-based terrorist attack.
Potential violent criminals will often need to go through a sequence of preparatory steps before they can execute their plans. During this escalation process police have the opportunity to evaluate the threat posed by such people through what they know, observe and learn from intelligence reports about their activities. In this paper we customise a three-level Bayesian hierarchical model to describe this process. This is able to propagate both routine and unexpected evidence in real time. We discuss how to set up such a model so that it calibrates to domain expert judgments. The model illustrations include a hypothetical example based on a potential vehicle based terrorist attack.