Modeling the Effect of Streetscape Environment on Crime Using Street View Images and Interpretable Machine-Learning Technique

Street crime is a common social problem that threatens the security of people’s lives and property. Understanding the influencing mechanisms of street crime is an essential precondition for formulating crime prevention strategies. Widespread concern has contributed to the development of streetscape environment features as they can significantly affect the occurrence of street crime. Emerging street view images are a low-cost and highly accessible data source. On the other hand, machine-learning models such as XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) usually have higher fitting accuracies than those of linear regression models. Therefore, they are popular for modeling the relationships between crime and related impact factors. However, due to the “black box” characteristic, researchers are unable to understand how each variable contributes to the occurrence of crime. Existing research mainly focuses on the independent impacts of streetscape environment features on street crime, but not on the interaction effects between these features and the community socioeconomic conditions and their local variations. In order to address the above limitations, this study first combines street view images, an objective detection network, and a semantic segmentation network to extract a systematic measurement of the streetscape environment. Then, controlling for socioeconomic factors, we adopted the XGBoost model to fit the relationships between streetscape environment features and street crime at the street segment level. Moreover, we used the SHAP (Shapley additive explanation) framework, a post-hoc machine-learning explainer, to explain the results of the XGBoost model. The results demonstrate that, from a global perspective, the number of people on the street, extracted from street view images, has the most significant impact on street property crime among all the street view variables. The local interpretability of the SHAP explainer demonstrates that a particular variable has different effects on street crime at different street segments. The nonlinear associations between streetscape environment features and street crime, as well as the interaction effects of different streetscape environment features are discussed. The positive effect of the number of pedestrians on street crime increases with the length of the street segment and the number of crime generators. The combination of street view images and interpretable machine-learning techniques is helpful in better accurately understanding the complex relationships between the streetscape environment and street crime. Furthermore, the readily comprehensible results can offer a reference for formulating crime prevention strategies.