A quantitative analysis of behavioral case linkage for practice

Behavioral case linkage is the method of identifying crimes committed by the same offender analyzing offender's behavior in crime scenes. Previous researches on behavioral case linkage have not provided enough information of analyzing procedure and predictive validity of quantitative case linkage in practice, especially in case of number of serial offences is more than four. In the present study, we illustrated the procedure of quantitative case linkage for practice, and investigated predictive validity of behavioral case linkage analysis, conducting a simulation experiment analyzing crime scene data from 90 serial rape cases of 18 offenders by hierarchical cluster analysis and non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS). The results of the study indicated that 66% of the trials were perfectly or satisfactorily performed (average Cohen's kappa=0.78) in a simulation experiment of hierarchical cluster analysis. The results also indicated that MDS could effectively illustrate association between serial rapes by different offenders in most of trials. It is considered that quantitative case linkage based on crime scene behavior has enough predictive validity for helping crime investigations to link a number of serial crimes to one offender and reduce the cost of investigation of serial crimes.

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