Predicting criminal recidivism using neural networks

Prediction of criminal recidivism has been extensively studied in criminology with a variety of statistical models. This article proposes the use of neural network (NN) models to address the problem of splitting the population into two groups — non-recidivists and eventual recidivists — based on a set of predictor variables. The results from an empirical study of the classification capabilities of NN on a well-known recidivism data set are presented and discussed in comparison with logistic regression. Analysis indicates that NN models are competitive with, and may offer some advantages over, traditional statistical models in this domain.