Distance to the scaling law: a useful approach for unveiling relationships between crime and urban metrics.

ABSTRACT: We report on a quantitative analysis of relationships between the number of homicides, population size and ten other urban metrics. By using data from Brazilian cities, we show that well-defined average scaling laws with the population size emerge when investigating the relations between population and number of homicides as well as population and urban metrics. We also show that the fluctuations around the scaling laws are log-normally distributed, which enabled us to model these scaling laws by a stochastic-like equation driven by a multiplicative and log-normally distributed noise. Because of the scaling laws, we argue that it is better to employ logarithms in order to describe the number of homicides in function of the urban metrics via regression analysis. In addition to the regressio

SUBMITTER: Alves LG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3734155 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature