Build your own pre-cog

Okay, this is not really about pre-cog, but just a pointer to some data that might be of interest to people. A number of cities post their crime data online, ready for scraping and data analysis. For example, the Baltimore Sun has a Google map of homicides in the city of Baltimore. There’s also some data for Oakland.

Looking at the map is fun, but not particularly useful from a data analysis standpoint. However, with a little fiddling (and some knowledge of XML), you can pull the data from the map and use it for data analysis.

Why not build your own model to predict crime?

I’ll just add that the model used in the pre-cog program was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in this article.