Application of the behavioral investigative support system for profiling perpetrators of serial sexual assaults

The authors developed a data‐based profiling system in order to support offender profiling. The system stored incident records of prior offenders. Inputting offence details of an unsolved incident, a probability score was assigned to each prior offender in the system; the score represented the behavioral similarity with the unsolved incident. The system then ranked all offenders in the system according to the probability scores, and prioritized the high‐ranked offenders as possible suspects. Moreover, the system inferred the characteristics of unknown offenders by accumulating characteristics of the high‐ranked offenders. The system achieved promising accuracy, especially for linking crimes to perpetrators. In 45 out of 81 simulation trials, the target offenders were retrieved as a rank score of 1 from among 868 sex offenders. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.