Hate Crime Analysis based on Artificial Intelligence Methods

Abstract

Hate crimes always take a toll on American citizens, which harms social security. It is essential for researchers to explore the factors, which lead to hate crimes. This research is to find out the relationship between hate crimes and factors including income inequality, median household income, race using Machine Learning methods. Machine Learning, as an important branch in Artificial Intelligence, is a good way for finding relationships between things. The research is based on a dataset of hate crimes rates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as well as hate crimes rates in every U.S. state from 2010 to 2015. Simply linear regression and multiple linear regression are used to describe the factors that influence the crime rate and their contributions, such as share of white poverty or share of non-white residents, or the median household income. Then, K-means is applied to classify hate crimes into 5 levels according to the crime rate. Furthermore, KNearest Neighbors is used to demonstrate a prediction of hate crime. At last, a histogram is applied to indicate the variance of the hate crimes in different states. From linear regression, four highest correlation coefficients with a hate crime can be found out, which are income inequality, median household income, the share of noncitizen, and race in turn. Income inequality has the highest correlation coefficient with a hate crime. From multiple linear regression, it can be found out that only by implementing income inequality, median household income, and race can we obtain the highest R square values, which are 0.44 for 2010 to 2015 hate crimes and 0.33 for 2016 hate crimes. From the K-Nearest Neighbors method, hate crimes can be predicted with an accuracy of 40% by applying median household income. Adding the race factor, accuracy rises to 50%. In summary, income inequality, median household income, and race have a high impact on the crime rate. The median household income and the race could predict the crime rate with an accuracy of about 50%.