Predicting Reports of Theft in Businesses via Machine Learning

This study examines the reporting factors of crime against business in Korea and proposes a corresponding predictive model using machine learning. While many previous studies focused on the individual factors of theft victims, there is a lack of evidence on the reporting factors of crime against a business that serves the public good as opposed to those that protect private property. Therefore, we proposed a crime prevention model for the willingness factor of theft reporting in businesses. This study used data collected through the 2015 Commercial Crime Damage Survey conducted by the Korea Institute for Criminal Policy. It analyzed data from 834 businesses that had experienced theft during a 2016 crime investigation. The data showed a problem with unbalanced classes. To solve this problem, we jointly applied the Synthetic Minority Over Sampling Technique and the Tomek link techniques to the training data. Two prediction models were implemented. One was a statistical model using logistic regression and elastic net. The other involved a support vector machine model, tree-based machine learning models (e.g., random forest, extreme gradient boosting), and a stacking model. As a result, the features of theft price, invasion, and remedy, which are known to have significant effects on reporting theft offences, can be predicted as determinants of such offences in companies. Finally, we verified and compared the proposed predictive models using several popular metrics. Based on our evaluation of the importance of the features used in each model, we suggest a more accurate criterion for predicting var.