Optimal Intervention for Self-triggering Spatial Networks with Application to Urban Crime Analytics

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Das, Pramit, Banerjee, Moulinath, Sun, Yuekai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910968581193728
author Das, Pramit
Banerjee, Moulinath
Sun, Yuekai
author_facet Das, Pramit
Banerjee, Moulinath
Sun, Yuekai
contents In many network systems, events at one node trigger further activity at other nodes, e.g., social media users reacting to each other's posts or the clustering of criminal activity in urban environments. These systems are typically referred to as self-exciting networks. In such systems, targeted intervention at critical nodes can be an effective strategy for mitigating undesirable consequences such as further propagation of criminal activity or the spreading of misinformation on social media. In our work, we develop an optimal network intervention model to explore how targeted interventions at critical nodes can mitigate cascading effects throughout a Spatiotemporal Hawkes network. Similar models have been studied previously in the literature in purely temporal Hawkes networks, but in our work, we extend them to a spatiotemporal setup and demonstrate the efficacy of our methods by comparing the post-intervention reduction in intensity to other heuristic strategies in simulated networks. Subsequently, we use our method on crime data from the LA police department database to find neighborhoods for strategic intervention to demonstrate an application in predictive policing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19612
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimal Intervention for Self-triggering Spatial Networks with Application to Urban Crime Analytics
Das, Pramit
Banerjee, Moulinath
Sun, Yuekai
Social and Information Networks
Methodology
In many network systems, events at one node trigger further activity at other nodes, e.g., social media users reacting to each other's posts or the clustering of criminal activity in urban environments. These systems are typically referred to as self-exciting networks. In such systems, targeted intervention at critical nodes can be an effective strategy for mitigating undesirable consequences such as further propagation of criminal activity or the spreading of misinformation on social media. In our work, we develop an optimal network intervention model to explore how targeted interventions at critical nodes can mitigate cascading effects throughout a Spatiotemporal Hawkes network. Similar models have been studied previously in the literature in purely temporal Hawkes networks, but in our work, we extend them to a spatiotemporal setup and demonstrate the efficacy of our methods by comparing the post-intervention reduction in intensity to other heuristic strategies in simulated networks. Subsequently, we use our method on crime data from the LA police department database to find neighborhoods for strategic intervention to demonstrate an application in predictive policing.
title Optimal Intervention for Self-triggering Spatial Networks with Application to Urban Crime Analytics
topic Social and Information Networks
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19612