Movement of insurgent gangs: A Bayesian kernel density model for incomplete temporal data

Abstract

We develop a Bayesian modeling framework to address a pressing real-life problem faced by the police in tackling insurgent gangs. Unlike criminals associated with common crimes such as robbery, theft or street crime, insurgent gangs are trained in sophisticated arms and strategise against the government to weaken its resolve. They are constantly on the move, operating over large areas causing damage to national properties and terrorizing ordinary citizens. Different from the more commonly addressed problem of modeling crime-events, our context requires that an approach be formulated to model the movement of insurgent gangs, which is more valuable to the police forces in preempting their activities and nabbing them. This paper evolved as a collaborative work with the Indian police to help augment their tactics with a systematic method, by integrating past data on observed gang-locations with the expert knowledge of the police officers. A methodological challenge in modeling the movement of insurgent gangs is that the data on their locations is incomplete, since they are observable only at some irregularly separated time-points. Based on a weighted kernel density formulation for temporal data, we analytically derive the closed form of the likelihood, conditional on incomplete past observed data. Building on the current tactics used by the police, we device an approach for constructing an expert-prior on gang-locations, along with a sequential Bayesian procedure for estimation and prediction. We also propose a new metric for predictive assessment that complements another known metric used in similar problems.