VPD Crime Data Exploration (vpd-crime-data-exploration)

Project complete in accordance with DSCI 532 for the UBC MDS Program 2022-23

About

The repository hosts the source code of an exploration of the VPD Crime Data. For information on the intention, research questions, as well as a more detailed description of the data, please read the proposal instead.

The objective of this dashboard it to enable users to make inferences on the (aggregated) crime data in Vancouver, BC between 2003 to 2022.

Usage

The latest version at master is deployed here.

On the left, the user can choose to drill down on the aggregated crime data. The three filters are:

• Year (defaulted to 2003 - 2022)
• Offence Types
• Neighbourhoods

After the selection, the user can see the plots on the right updated on the fly. On the top, there is a time series line chart. By choosing other tabs there, the user can choose not to facet the data, facet it by offence type, and facet it by neighbourhood. At the bottom, there is a heatmap which plots offence type against neighbourhood.

Usage (Advanced)

If you are considering to contribute, hack, or simply fork this app, great! Before moving on, make sure your computer has Python development environment set up. IDEs like Visual Studio Code are optional. Developing on POSIX (Linux) or Mac is recommmended, but Windows should also work.

Download the Code

The latest copy of this code can be downloaded by:

git clone https://github.com/netsgnut/vpd-crime-data-exploration
cd vpd-crime-data-exploration

Create a virtualenv

Create a virtualenv under the folder .venv, in the project root folder.

(Note that you can also use other tools to create a virtual environment.)

python -m venv .venv

Use the virtualenv

. .venv/bin/activate

Install the dependencies

pip install -r src/requirements.txt

Run it!

To run it via Flask locally:

cd src
python app.py

Or, alternatively, you could enable the debug mode with:

cd src
DEBUG=1 python app.py

(Optional) Data wrangling script

There is a script at src/process_data.py that reads the raw crimedata_csv_AllNeighbourhoods_AllYears.csv (extracted from the ZIP downloaded from the data portal) in data/raw/ and process it to be data/processed/crimedata_aggregated.csv. Normally, you don't need to run it because both files are provided. But if you would like to tweak the parameters and/or update it to the latest dataset, you can modify the script there.

Contributing

Thank you for your interest! Make sure to review the CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for more information!

Copyright and Licensing

The CSV files under data/ directory are works/direct derivative of works from the VPD Crime Data.

Copyright (c) 2003-2022 Vancouver Police Department

Unless otherwise specified, the materials in this repository are covered under this copyright statement:

Copyright (c) 2023 Kelvin Wong

The software and associated documentation files are licensed under the MIT License. You may find a copy of the license at LICENSE.

References

VPD Crime Data

NOTE: Regarding the assumptions of the dataset, please refer to the VPD OpenData Crime Incidents Description.pdf included in the data/raw/crimedata_csv_AllNeighbourhoods_AllYears.zip file file.