Despite their importance for stakeholders in the criminal justice system, few methods have been developed for determining which criminal behavior variables will produce accurate sentence predictions. Some approaches found in the literature resort to techniques based on indirect variables, but not on the social network behavior with exception of the work of Baker and Faulkner [ASR 58: 837–860, 1993]. Using information on the Caviar Network narcotics trafficking group as a real-world case, we attempt to explain sentencing outcomes employing the social network indicators. Specifically, we report the ability of centrality measures to predict a) the verdict (innocent or guilty) and b) the sentence length in years. We show that while the set of indicators described by Baker and Faulkner yields good predictions, introduction of the additional centrality measures generates better predictions. Some ideas for orienting future research on further improvements to sentencing outcome prediction are discussed.A pesar de la importancia para diferentes actores involucrados en el sistema judicial, se han desarrollados pocos métodos para determinar las variables del comportamiento organizado que permiten predecir las sentencias judiciales de redes criminales. Algunas aproximaciones encontradas en la literatura especializada usa variables indirectas al comportamiento organizado y no en el comportamiento en red de estas organizaciones. Nosotros usamos información real sobre un caso de red criminal real que operó en Montreal (Canadá) y analizamos la comunicación entre los miembros de la red para determinar si su comportamiento comunicacional permite predecir el veredicto así como los años de sentencia. Encontramos que los modelos de regresión obtenidos y las variables de centralidad nodal utilizadas por nosotros logra un mejor capacidad predictiva. Finalmente, se discuten algunas ideas dirigidas a mejorar la predicción de sentencias judiciales desde las medidas de redes sociales

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A methodological approach is developed for exploring the relationship between the use of social networking sites and participation in protest activities. Although a recent meta-analysis study demonstrated that there is a positive association between the two, little work examining this association further appears to have been published. The methodology proposed here studies the patterns of the relationship between nine social media and five types of protest activity using the techniques of multiple correspondence analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis and induction of decision rules. The results give insights into the relationship in different segments of individuals' profiles defined as non-activist, offline activist, social media user (two types) and online activist. Significantly, this last segment proves to be a small and heterogeneous group. The results also show that the proposed approach is useful for exploring the patterns of the relationship in a low-dimensional space. Limitations of the methodology and possible extensions are discussed.

The aim of this paper was to create a decision tree (DT) to identify personality profiles of offenders against public safety. A technique meeting this requirement was proposed that uses the C4.5 algorithm to derive decision rules for personality profiling of public safety offenders. The Mini-Mult test was used to measure the personality profiles of 238 individuals. With the test results as our database, a C4.5 DT was applied to construct rules that classify each profile into one of two groups, those without and those with records of offences against public safety. The model correctly classified 80% of the personality profiles and delivered a set of decision rules for distinguishing the profiles by group, and the principal personality profiles were interpreted. We conclude that DTs are a promising technique for analysing personality profiles by their offender or non-offender status. Finally, we believe that the development of a classifying model using DT may have practical applications in the Colombian prison syste

Modelling criminal trial verdict outcomes using social network measures is an emerging research area in quantitative criminology. Few studies have yet analyzed which of these measures are the most important for verdict modelling or which data classification techniques perform best for this application. To compare the performance of different techniques in classifying members of a criminal network, this article applies three different machine learning classifiers–Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes and Random Forest–with a range of social network measures and the necessary databases to model the verdicts in two real–world cases: the U.S. Watergate Conspiracy of the 1970’s and the now–defunct Canada–based international drug trafficking ring known as the Caviar Network. In both cases it was found that the Random Forest classifier did better than either Logistic Regression or Naïve Bayes, and its superior performance was statistically significant. This being so, Random Forest was used not only for classification but also to assess the importance of the measures. For the Watergate case, the most important one proved to be betweenness centrality while for the Caviar Network, it was the effective size of the network. These results are significant because they show that an approach combining machine learning with social network analysis not only can generate accurate classification models but also helps quantify the importance social network variables in modelling verdict outcomes. We conclude our analysis with a discussion and some suggestions for future work in verdict modelling using social network measures.

This paper describes a network reduction technique to reveal possibly hidden relational patterns in information diffusion networks of interlinked content published across different types of online media. Topic specific content items such as tweets (Twitter), web pages, or versions of Wikipedia articles can reference each other through hyperlinks, revisions, or retweet relationships, and thus, constitute a network that reflects the dissemination of information on the web. Beyond focusing on the structural linking of content items alone, the temporal aspect of information diffusion is explicitly taken into account by modelling the edge weight between two interlinked items according to the difference in their publication times. Non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) is applied to decompose the resulting networks into groups of nodes occupying similar positions, which means that they have similar abilities to spread or receive information to or from other nodes. This allows for an easier observation of the basic underlying structure of cross-media information diffusion networks and their main information pathways. The utility of the approach and differences to other techniques will be demonstrated along two application scenarios related to two popular news stories and their dissemination in online media in 2016.