A Reinforcement Learning Approach Combined With Scope Loss Function for Crime Prediction on Twitter (X)

Abstract

Online social networks, especially Twitter (X), have become focal points for illicit activities, providing unique criminal investigation opportunities. This paper introduces an innovative methodology that uses social media sentiment analysis to predict criminal activities. One major challenge in sentiment analysis is the uneven distribution of sentiment classes, where traditional models often fail to accurately classify instances of the minority class due to the overwhelming presence of majority class data. To tackle this issue, we propose a model that combines a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm with a scope loss function. The RL approach uses a reward mechanism that assigns a more significant value to correctly predicting minority class instances over majority class ones. The scope loss function ensures an optimal balance between utilizing known data and exploring new data, thus maintaining a delicate equilibrium between accuracy and generalizability. Our model employs a series of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract significant features from textual content, which are then utilized for sentiment classification. We also incorporate an advanced artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization technique to refine the model's hyperparameters. The effectiveness of our approach was empirically tested using two distinct datasets: one consisting of crime incident reports from the Chicago Police Department covering the period from September 2019 to July 2024 and another comprising tweets containing crime-related terms related to Chicago. The predictive capabilities of our proposed model were benchmarked against existing models, demonstrating superior performance with accuracies of 96.411% and 94.088%, respectively. This breakthrough highlights the potential of integrating sentiment analysis with reinforcement learning to significantly enhance the predictive accuracy of crime-related activities in online social networks, offering valuable insights for law enforcement and criminal investigation applications.

Keywords

• Crime prediction
• sentiment analysis
• reinforcement learning
• class imbalance
• hyperparameter tuning
• artificial bee colony