Auto Theft Visualizatoin - Chicago

Visual display of automobile theft in the city of Chicago.

Necessary packages to reproduce the graph.

## INITIALIZE
library("leaflet")
library("data.table")
library("sp")
library("rgdal")
library("KernSmooth")

Download the most recent data using the API provide by the city of Chicago.

inurl <- "https://data.cityofchicago.org/api/views/22s8-eq8h/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD"
infile <- "mvthefts.csv"

## LOAD DATA
## Also, clean up variable names, and convert dates
if(!file.exists(infile)){
    download.file(url = inurl, destfile = infile, method = "curl")
}
dat <- data.table::fread(infile)
setnames(dat, tolower(colnames(dat)))
setnames(dat, gsub(" ", "_", colnames(dat)))
dat <- dat[!is.na(longitude)]
dat[ , date := as.IDate(date, "%m/%d/%Y")]

Plot mechanics.

## MAKE CONTOUR LINES
## Note, bandwidth choice is based on MASS::bandwidth.nrd()
kde <- bkde2D(dat[ , list(longitude, latitude)],
              bandwidth=c(.0045, .0068), gridsize = c(100,100))
CL <- contourLines(kde$x1 , kde$x2 , kde$fhat)

## EXTRACT CONTOUR LINE LEVELS
LEVS <- as.factor(sapply(CL, `[[`, "level"))
NLEV <- length(levels(LEVS))

## CONVERT CONTOUR LINES TO POLYGONS
pgons <- lapply(1:length(CL), function(i)
    Polygons(list(Polygon(cbind(CL[[i]]$x, CL[[i]]$y))), ID=i))
spgons = SpatialPolygons(pgons)

And voila!

Next we wil add the names of those area to a table to warn car owners of the risk of auto theft. Zooming in on the map itself will provide those details as well. Also given the richness of this data set, we will explore in details what make these parts of the city so crime-prone.