Stay safe at Columbia University
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Haochen Sun ( hs3393 )
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Yuanhao Zhang ( yz4436 )
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Zhenyu Zhou ( zz2900 )
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Yuze Yuan ( yy3296 )
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Anzhuo Xie ( ax2173 )
Studying at Columbia University, except enjoying fascinating school life, we should always be concerned about the safety problem. Frequent email alerts, Citizen apps popping up, and terrifying news, they are all reminding us that there are many underlying unsafe factors around us. The New York government has made a public crime map at https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/. The information in it, however, is way too redundant for a student as we are more concerned about the safety conditions around our campus and our places of residence. Luckily, NYPD has posted the up-to-date dataset that includes all valid felony, misdemeanor, and violation crimes reported to the New York City Police Department, and it includes more information that we are interested in, for example, the time of occurrence of the complaint, the victim’s statistics. After analyzing the dataset, we can have a more comprehensive understanding about the crimes around us. Finally, we want to draw a fine map locating the crime incidents around our campus, informing us what time may be more dangerous and we can avoid activities at that time. We also want this result to help all the staff and students in Columbia University have an opportunity to evaluate the risk, avoid the danger, and allow them to access crime rates in the areas they care about to keep themselves safe.
The data is from NYC Opendata, https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Complaint-Data-Current-Year-To-Date-/5uac-w243.This dataset is provided by NYPD, and is recently updated on Oct.19th. This dataset have 81.4K views and 16.7 downloads. Therefore, this dataset is expected to be accurate, authoritative, prompt and worth analyzing.
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As the dataset is large, it maybe hard to filter the useful information. For example, we need to careful consider what the time range is more appropriate, the data from early dates may not be informative for reference now, but few data cannot generate significant conclusion as well.
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As we wished, the safety map should reflect the dangerous level of each location across one day. It requires us to draw a timeline and as we scroll it, the map will shift. This step may take some time to reach this goal and make the map concise and attractive.
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We want to build a model to predict the risk of one student going out at a specific time and to a location, it maybe hard to select a model and variables to realize this function.
Date | Descriptions |
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Nov. 11 – Nov. 18 | Data download, cleaning, and EDA |
Nov. 19 – Nov. 25 | Data visualization, making website |
Nov. 25 – Dec. 10 | Writing report and creating screencast |