Interstitial crime analysis

Crime on public transport can be very difficult to analyse. 'Stealth crimes' like pick-pocketing
present a particular challenge because victims often have an imprecise knowledge of the location
and time of the offence. In this scenario crime has typically been recorded as happening at the
reporting station (often at the ‘end of line’) which skews any analysis of the collective crime
locations.
Interstitial crime analysis (ICA) is a technique which overcomes this problem and improves the
estimation of the spatial distribution of crime on networks when the exact location of offences is
unknown. Based on the aoristic analysis technique (devised to estimate the temporal distribution of
crime when only a time period is known), ICA is used to estimate the location of crimes in the
interstices – the intervening spaces - of a network when the location is unknown.