Young Researchers Workshop: Kinetic models in biology and social sciences

Stochastic-statistical modeling of criminal behavior

Chuntian Wang

University of California, Los Angeles

Residential crime is one of the toughest issues in modern society. A quantitative, informative, and applicable model of criminal behavior is needed to assist law enforcement. We have made progress to the pioneering statistical agent-based model of residential burglary (Short et al., Math. Models Methods Appl., 2008) in two ways. (1) In one space dimension, we assumed that the movement patterns of the criminals involve truncated Lévy distributions for the jump length, other than classical random walks (Short et al., Math. Models Methods Appl., 2008) or Lévy flights without truncation (Chaturapruek et al., SIAM J. Appl. Math, 2013). This is the first time that the truncated Lévy flights have been applied in crime modeling. Furthermore (2), in two space dimensions, we used the Poisson clocks to govern the time steps of the evolution of the model, rather than a discrete time Markov chain with deterministic time increments used in the previous works. Poisson clocks are particularly suitable to model the times at which arrivals enter a system. Moreover, this modification brings the model into the mathematical framework of Markov pure jump processes, interacting particle systems, and stochastic differential equations with Lévy noise.