Topographic maps for domestic violence analysis [in Japanese]

Topographic maps are an appealing exploratory instrument for discovering new knowledge from databases. During the past years, new types of Self Organizing Maps (SOM) were introduced in the literature. In this paper, a recent Emergent SOM tool and a recent spherical SOM tool are used to study an interesting dataset. The dataset consists of a set of police reports describing all violent incidents that occurred during the first quarter of 2006 in the police region Amsterdam-Amstelland (the Netherlands). It is demonstrated that spherical topographic maps provide a powerful instrument for analyzing this dataset. In addition, the performance of the Emergent SOM is compared to the performance of the spherical SOM and turned out to be superior to that of an ordinary classifier, applied directly to the data.