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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Would be fascinating to see how these data correlate with crime statistics, in particular for violent crimes. Perhaps more fascinating would be if changes in these scores could actually predict changes in crime levels. I'm sure the authors–or their colleagues-are already working on this.

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This isn't the best visualization, but I just spent a couple minutes overlaying the New York map with Trulia's crime risk heat map[1,2]. I think the important takeaway is that the green dots visible in the red areas can be interpreted as false negatives for danger. Of course, this is a really, really rough sketch so take it with a grain of salt.

[1]: http://www.trulia.com/local/new-york-ny/tiles:1|points:1_cri...

[2]: http://imgur.com/HOuJFKZ

The crime map seems awfully suspicious to me. It appears to be more of a population density map than anything. All the red areas south of 34th St. just look like common places for people to hang out (and drink alcohol).

I think what people really want is a crime map that plots crimes committed at random, rather than drinking buddies beating each other up.

I also took a look at vermont, and the red areas were because of things like "traffic stop" or "e911 hangup".

Check this map instead http://i.imgur.com/QwvATt1.jpg The authors already did that analysis, but they incorporated population, area, age, income and perception of safety into a statistical model used to predict violent crimes.

It is important to go beyond the bivariate case here. Comparing streetscore to crime is too simple to be meaningful if other co-variates are not taken into account. For the full description (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...)

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