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Comment by awhitty | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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