The goal of our study is to find an appropriate model to predict the factors that reduce the number of serious crimes in a county. In other words, we hope to find the factors that might have impacts on the crime rates. Furthermore, we want to know what kinds of approaches we could take in order to reduce the crime rate in a county.
The results of our study show that the possible factors include population density, population, the average number of hospital beds, percentage of people who completed 12 or more years of school, and percentage of the population with income below poverty level.
All these five factors have positive effects on the crime rate, which we need to decrease their effects to reduce the crime rate. Moreover, crime rate in the South is higher than in other regions of the United States. We also find that the population has an even higher positive effect in the South. The reduction of crime rate can be achieved by population control and eliminating poverty.
Serious crime is always a complex issue faced by every government. The results of this analysis are important as people will have a better understanding of the possible factors that might influence the number of serious crimes. Without such researches on crime data, governors would hardly find solutions to crimes. For the purpose of our research, we use crime rate (the number of serious crimes divided by the population) instead of crime as our response variable. Due to the different scales of variables, we divide the population by 10,000.
Besides 21 predictors, we have created 4 new variables by dividing the area, the number of physicians, and the number of hospital beds by population in 10,000. Then we divided the population by area to eliminate the influence of the size of that county. Moreover, we use income per capita instead of total income as total income is strongly correlated with the population.
