International Journal of Digital Earth

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Spatial prediction of sparse events using a discrete

global grid system; a case study of hate crimes in
the USA

Michael Jendryke & Stephen C. McClure

To cite this article: Michael Jendryke & Stephen C. McClure (2021) Spatial prediction of sparse
events using a discrete global grid system; a case study of hate crimes in the USA, International
Journal of Digital Earth, 14:6, 789-805, DOI: 10.1080/17538947.2021.1886356

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2021.1886356

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH
2021, VOL. 14, NO. 6, 789–805
https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2021.1886356

Spatial prediction of sparse events using a discrete global grid

system; a case study of hate crimes in the USA
a,b b
Michael Jendryke and Stephen C. McClure
a
The State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan
University, People’s Republic of China; bSchool of Resources and Environmental Science, Wuhan University,
People’s Republic of China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Spatial prediction of any geographic phenomenon can be an intractable Received 23 August 2020
problem. Predicting sparse and uncertain spatial events related to many Accepted 2 February 2021
influencing factors necessitates the integration of multiple data sources.
KEYWORDS
We present an innovative approach that combines data in a Discrete Discrete global grid system;
Global Grid System (DGGS) and uses machine learning for analysis. A geospatial data integration;
DGGS provides a structured input for multiple types of spatial data, artificial neural network;
consistent over multiple scales. This data framework facilitates the spatial prediction; sparse
training of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to map and predict a events; hates crimes
phenomenon. Spatial lag regression models (SLRM) are used to evaluate
and rank the outputs of the ANN. In our case study, we predict hate
crimes in the USA. Hate crimes get attention from mass media and the
scientific community, but data on such events is sparse. We trained the
ANN with data ingested in the DGGS based on a 50% sample of hate
crimes as identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Our
spatial prediction is up to 78% accurate and verified at the state level
against the independent FBI hate crime statistics with a fit of 80%. The
derived risk maps are a guide to action for policy makers and law
enforcement.

1. Introduction
Geographically predicting sparse and uncertain events is a challenging problem and especially com-
plex when such estimates are derived from a multitude of scale- dependent factors and attributes
that influencee these events. Thus, a data structure that allows the integration of many data sets
and an algorithm to analyze the data is necessary. A Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) is a
valid platform (Sahr, White, and Jon Kimerling 2003) that enables fast integration of many file for-
mats and sources (Purss et al. 2016) and allows geospatial data processing (Sahr 2011) of large
volumes of data. Gridded data, processed by an artificial neural network to analyze and predict
sparse events is a powerful method that can be applied to variety of spatial phenomena, generating
new knowledge from incomplete and imperfect information. We believe the proposed method is a
generic framework that significantly decreases the gap between murky lakes of big data and action-
able insights for informed decision-making. We present a machine learning methodology to predict
sparse and uncertain events by combining multiple datasets comprised of demographic, social and
economic attributes using a DGGS and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), thereby overcoming
the problems of data integration and prediction of sparsely labeled data, like hate crimes.

CONTACT Stephen C. McClure smcclure@whu.edu.cn

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2021.1886356
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
790 M. JENDRYKE AND S. CHARLES MCCLURE

A scan of the scientific literature revealed no consensus on the frequency or causes of hate crime.
Some researchers expressed alarm over alleged increases in hate crimes and hate motivated inci-
dents, but other researchers are more skeptical about the hate crime epidemic (Jacobs and Potter
1997; Byers and Zeller 2001). This uncertainty is reflected in the hate crime research agenda
(Green, Mcfalls, and Smith 2001) with several proposed explanations for hate crimes, including ter-
ritorial defence (Green, Strolovitch, and Wong 1998) or contested boundaries (Legewie and Scha-
effer 2016), economic factors (Green, Glaser, and Rich 1996; Gale, Heath, and Ressler 2002), but
also race and far-right extremist ideology (Adamczyk et al. 2014; Espiritu 2004), dealing with com-
munity and demographic change or, relative deprivation (Medina et al. 2018). Medina et al.
accounted for the regional variation in hate groups but did not associate hate groups to hate crimes,
(Medina et al. 2018). Other researchers have explored the relationship between hate crimes and hate
groups (Jefferson and Pryor 1999; Mulholland 2013; Ryan and Leeson 2011), but only 40% of hate
crimes are collocated with hate groups (Jendryke and McClure 2019). Our interests were however,
were less focused on hate crimes and causal factors, but methods for dealing with this kind of sparse,
uncertain, and politically contentious data. We looked at multiple data sources as mentioned in the
literature to make predictions, correlations, and thus provide a strategic overview of the geography
of hate crimes as a case study to demonstrate the utility of the DGGS plus ANN approach.
The context for this research includes ongoing engagement with community-based 501c (3) and
501 c (4) organizations focused on civic participation in under-represented Black, Latinx, and Asian
communities. One recurrent issue has been hate crimes and intimidation by suspected hate groups
directed at these marginalized communities, and the impact of these activities on contentious pol-
itical questions like voting rights, persistent patterns of social exclusion, and racialized violence
such as during the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that left one person dead.
As researchers our agenda is distinct and independent from the goals and agenda of the civic
organizations that prompted this research. There is tension between the researcher and other par-
ticipants in action research (Pain 2015; Katz 1992; Rose 1997). Community organizations have
interests that intersect but do not coincide with researchers-reflecting a mismatch between diver-
gent assumptions about reality, methods for exploring that reality, and ways of relating to that rea-
lity. Colliding epistemologies (Gibson, Brennan-Horley, and Warren 2010) however, create
opportunities for new knowledge production. Thus, the questions we explored were path depen-
dent, inviting experimentation with diverse methodological approaches.
A data-driven approach using an ANN (Grekousis 2019) prediction model when empirically
cross-validated with spatial regression (Anselin and Rey 2014), provides location insights, situa-
tional awareness, and actionable intelligence for informed decision-making. The fusion of big
data into a multi-scale, multi-source DGGS is the backbone of this multilevel approach, which
we apply to hate crimes.
This approach is innovative because it combines open data, a discrete global grid system (DGGS)
and an artificial neural network (ANN) to tackle a contentious social issue – hate crimes. To the best
of our knowledge, this method has not been explored. There have been a number of papers on the
explanation of hate crimes, but none about the prediction of this phenomenon. The data we used in
the presented work is a collection of attributes mentioned in the papers trying to explain hate
crimes. However, with this volume and variety of data we faced the issue of how to integrate all
these sources into a consistent data structure. Here the DGGS and ANN approach proved to be
a strong combination to get a computer assisted view for decision making at a very granular
level to support community-based organizations.
The presented maps could support situational awareness among policy makers, law enforce-
ment, and communities at risk to improve management of hate crime and potential threats to
civil society stemming from violent extremism. We verified our data with hate crime statistics col-
lected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2017). Our
research shows that hate crimes are neither random nor unpredictable and are not simply
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 791

correlated to population; they can be spatially predicted using an ANN and a set of attributes ident-
ified theoretically within the literature.

2. Theoretical framework and methods

The theoretical framework section is divided into four parts: the data storage platform using a Dis-
crete Global Grid System (DGGS), the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) design to estimate the
model and cross-validate it, and the spatial lag regression model (SLRM), as well as the general pro-
cessing chain, see Figure 2. The DGGS is used to establish a uniform, multi-scale, equal-area data
platform based on hexagonal grid cells. The ANN is the mechanism by which the data is processed
to derive a prediction and the spatial lag regression model (SLRM) is used to validate spatial
relationships. We demonstrate a technical solution to make spatial predictions about a phenom-
enon using a rational, multi-scale, multi-dimensional framework, the DGGS. This method is gen-
eralizable across many domains and is applicable to other sparse data problems. Our research is
therefore embedded in the context of digital earth (Gore 1998; Goodchild et al. 2012) to better
understand our planet with the aid of artificial intelligence to predict spatial phenomena; the par-
titioning of space into information units is the foundation for our subsequent analysis.

2.1. Discrete global grid system (DGGS)

A DGGS addresses the problem of partitioning the surface of the earth into areas of (almost) equal
size while being consistent and multi-scale, and thus suitable for statistical analysis. In digital earth
theory (Gore 1998; Goodchild et al. 2012), a DGGS (Sahr, White, and Jon Kimerling 2003;
K. M. Sahr 2017) is a standardized multi-scale grid system (Purss et al. 2016). The DGGS idea
has been around since 1976 (Fuller and Applewhite 1976). Many studies deal with spatial indexing
(K. M. Sahr 2014; Amiri, Samavati, and Peterson 2015; Lin et al. 2017; Adams 2017). Research
specifically focuses on hierarchical indexing (K. Sahr 2019), or an actual physical representation
(Djavaherpour, Mahdavi-Amiri, and Samavati 2017), implemented in operational systems (Gibb
2016; K. Sahr, Dumas, and Choudhuri 2011) and applied to many domains and research questions
(Chen et al. 2019; Potere et al. 2009; Supp et al. 2015). A recent overview of DGGS, including thir-
teen papers, can be found in the special issue ‘Global Grid Systems’ (Samavati and Alderson 2020).
We used hexagonal cells in the design of the DGGS, but theoretically triangles or quads could
also be used (Mahdavi-Amiri, Harrison, and Samavati 2015). Each cell has a unique global identifi-
cation number that allows us to join tables with additional attributes. This creates the opportunity
to merge and combine datasets from different sources into a single table by splitting the geographic
polygon shape and re-aggregating the values to a hexagonal cell of the DGGS; an abstract location
depiction consistent and structured over multiple scales, see Figure 1 and Table S4 for more details.
A DGGS expresses relationships between cells clearly through a consistent structure, producing
a continuous surface at multiple resolutions. Cells of higher resolution are always related to cells of
the lower resolution and vice versa. At aperture 3, a center point of a hexagon is also the center
point of a cell at a higher resolution. A so-called hexagonal fishnet grid, as can often be found in
geographical information systems, does not provide this capability especially at multiple scales.
A transformation into raster space would encompass certain drawbacks. Raster data are popular
for data cubes, but still do not fully articulate the fact that the earth is a sphere and not a plane.
Also, pixels in a raster have four neighbors that share an ‘edge’ and four additional neighbors
that only share a ‘node’. A DGGS therefore, is a way to make a consistent and structured carto-
graphic argument. Compared to the boundaries of an administrative unit, a discrete global grid pro-
duces cell with similar cell geometry and identical cell topology, and thus a DGGS is more rational
when fusing different types of data, such as points or attributes of areal units.
Point level data is simply aggregated to grid cells, but data from areal units such as administrative
boundaries must be spatially interpolated. In this process, attribute data from areal units is split
792 M. JENDRYKE AND S. CHARLES MCCLURE

Figure 1. The discrete global grid system (DGGS) for cell sizes ∼784 km (left), ∼452 km (center) and ∼261 km (right), correspond-
ing to DGGS resolution 4, 5, and 6 respectively, see Table S4 for details. A DGGS partitions the surface of the sphere into hex-
agonal areas of almost equal size.

Figure 2. Flow chart of the entire process, the input data is transformed and re-aggregated to the cells of a DGGS, and then
processed by the ANN. The SLRM evaluates the models.

along the lines of the DGGS and the fractions of each unit are re-aggregated to the hexagonal cells,
thereby transforming the source geometry into an abstract grid. Each cell of the grid is a location
holding all the data as a table row with multiple attributes – telling the digital story of that place. The
grid system fuses data from multiple sources into a data platform with a consistent spatial geometry.
The consistent appearance of a location as a hexagon acknowledges the contingent and constructed
nature of maps (Kitchin 2008; Kitchin and Dodge 2007; Kitchin, Gleeson, and Dodge 2013) while
organizing the data in a format digestible by an ANN for predicting (sparse) phenomena.

2.2. Artificial neural network (ANN)

Machine learning efficiently processes structured input data such as images or tables with columns
and rows. The DGGS format is a large table with one row per cell with a virtually endless number of
associated attributes. We keep the spatiality, however, by converting the center points of each cell
into columns for latitude and longitude; one can imagine these as two dimensions of the entire data
set. The ANN learns iteratively by taking a sample of the data and applying weights and biases to the
attributes of each cell until the algorithm crosses a threshold defined by the user, based on the learn-
ing rate and the number of epochs. Over multiple epochs, the algorithm gains modeling experience
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 793

so that the prediction accuracy of the desired output attribute – the label – increases. We bring all
attributes, the raw data, to the algorithm and let the ANN itself decides which, or what combination
of attributes are significant, and which are not relevant (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Aaron 2016). The
black-box nature of ANNs and calculations based on correlation, however, does not reveal causal
relationships between attributes and predictive variables. These predictive results demand cross-
validation, external verification, and thorough interpretation.
Artificial neural networks (ANN), also called deep learning (DL), are described and explained at
length in (Hawkin 2014; Schmidhuber 2015; Nielsen 2015; Goodfellow, Bengio, and Aaron 2016)
and reviewed in (Lecun, Bengio, and Hinton 2015). With the advancements in computer science
and hardware development, neural networks have solved complex problems and reached unprece-
dented accuracy, e.g. predicting the location of a photo (Weyand, Kostrikov, and Philbin 2016).
Especially image classification, pattern recognition, and object detection are popular areas of con-
volutional neural network research. The applications for deep learning range from finance, health,
autonomous driving, to speech recognition and have permeated many of the data-driven fields.
Geography, GeoScience and earth observation are no exception to this, as discussed in two book
chapters in the ‘Manual of Digital Earth’: (Alderson et al. 2020) on ‘Digital Earth Platforms’ and
(Guérin, Aydin, and Mahdavi-Amiri 2020) on ‘Artificial Intelligence’. While object detection
from satellite images, or other remotely sensed imagery, receives much attention, comparatively lit-
tle has been done on prediction of social phenomena. As many of the variables describing a society
at a nation-wide level such as census information is not conveyed in imagery, nor are they in a data
format that is easily digestible by a neural network, we opted for the previously described DGGS to
prepare the data for the ANN. To evaluate the results of the ANN, a simple ordinary least squares
regression is not sufficient, as it does not consider spatial relationships.

2.3. Spatial lag regression model (SLRM)

An ordinary least squares regression (OLS) between two variables does not consider the spatiality of
the observations. Thus, spatial-autocorrelation effects that may influence the outcome of the
regression are not considered. Spatial autoregressive models or spatial regression consider space
in the calculation and are therefore suitable when dealing with geographic data. Borrowed from
spatial econometrics, these concepts are amply explained in (Anselin and Rey 2014) and (LeSage
1999) and reviewed as an established method in (Anselin 2010). Common regression models
that consider spatial dependence are geographically weighted regression (GWR), and spatial lag
and spatial error regression models where the last two rely on a spatial weight matrix.
When estimating the correlation coefficient between two geographic variables, it is necessary to
estimate the spatial dependence first. To do this, a so-called spatial weights matrix must be gener-
ated that conveys the information about neighboring entities by creating a list that specifies for each
object under observation its neighbors. There are different methods to create a spatial weight matrix
which are often contiguity or distance based. As an example, considering the state of Nevada, its
direct neighbors would be Idaho, Utah, Arizona, California, and Oregon. This information about
neighbors is stored in the spatial weights matrix and added as a term to the spatial regression
model equation. The strength of the correlation is then expressed as a pseudo R2-value, comparable
to the coefficient of determination in OLS regressions.
Using a DGGS proves to be a very suitable data framework when consistently generating the
spatial weight matrix. As we use hexagonal cells, a contiguity-based weight calculation such as
Queens or Rook, always produces six neighbors, at first order, that are also at an almost equal dis-
tance, producing comparable outputs across space. By increasing the order of the weights, more
neighbors are included, not only those that touch the central cell under observation but also
those further away. One computational problem that arises is the size of the spatial weight matrix
for large spatial data sets. To overcome this problem, we use the spatial two stage least squares
794 M. JENDRYKE AND S. CHARLES MCCLURE

(S2SLS) generalized moments (GM) lag model that approximates maximum likelihood (ML)
(Anselin and Rey 2014).

2.4. Processing chain

The main steps of the processing chain are data preparation, transform the input data into cells of a
DGGS at all desired resolutions and join all sources into a master table. Feed the master tables mul-
tiple times into the ANN model fitting and evaluate the results with SLRMs. Any raw data, be it
points, or polygons needs to be loaded into a spatial database system and transformed into the
cells of the DGGS. This means polygons from e.g. administrative boundaries such as census tracts
are stored as polygons, and points or postal addresses that need to be geo-coded are stored as points.
All data sets are stored in their own table with their geometry (e.g. census tract) in a separate row. If
the administrative boundary geometry is separated from the data table, a join based on a unique
identifier is necessary, see Figure 2.
We transform the raw data tables into cells of the DGGS by intersecting points with the grid cells
and by splitting polygons along the lines of the grid. We create a master table for each DGGS res-
olution, which aggregates the transformed input data into a table with many columns that hold the
attributes. One column in the master table stores the attribute that should be predicted, this will be
the so-called label for the artificial neural network model estimation. The ANN model uses the mas-
ter table as an input. This table is split into a training and testing dataset, at a 50:50 ratio. Half of all
the cells are used during model fitting, and the other half is used to test the model performance.
Each attribute in the master table is scaled to the range 0–1 immediately before the model is
run. We suggest running the model multiple times with batches that are 10% the size of the training
dataset at cell sizes 50, 29, 17 and 10 km using this random sample of the data to train the model.
After processing the master table in the ANN, a prediction result is achieved which needs to be
rescaled to the original data range (the range of the label data). A spatial lag regression model
will determine the result for each model run. We calculate the spatial weights matrix (Queens)
with up to third degree neighbors for the SLRM.

3. Case study: predicting hate crimes

We explore the fuzzy and ill-defined social issue of hate crimes using machine learning to predict
these incidents. While there is the hate crime statistics act (U.S.C. 1990), data availability at high
spatial resolution for hate crime cases is sparse and uncertain. By employing a structured data plat-
form, a DGGS, we can combine social and economic parameters as well as calculated parameters to
predict hate crimes and validate the results of the model. The model learns based on a random
sample of DGGS cells and outputs the predicted count of hate crimes for each cell. This allowed
us to test the proposed model at different scales, as hate crimes and the underlying social and econ-
omic factors precipitating these incidents are scale dependent. We validated these results using a
completely independent dataset.
We implemented a feed-forward neural network, also called multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to
process the prepared data. This sequential model uses one densely connected input layer, one hid-
den layer and a single output cell to achieve a regression model that predicts a continuous value. We
applied rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation for each layer. We compiled the model with a root-
mean-square propagation RMSprop optimizer (Hinton, Srivastava, and Swersky 2014), with a
learning rate of 0.00001, using the mean squared error metrics. The input data is shuffled and
fed in batches during model fitting. As we run our model multiple times and want to keep the
results as comparable as possible, we keep the learning rate low, and end the model estimation
after 500 epochs.
To account for uncertainties in the ANN model estimation and to allow cross-validation of the
results, we design the following strategy. We apply a 50:50 random split between training and
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 795

testing data before the data is used in the neural network. In the specific case of this study, a 50%
random sample of all the DGGS cells covering contiguous USA is used to train the model. We run
the model 20 times at each of the four selected cell sizes with a diameter of ∼10 km to ∼50 km. With
each iteration, another 50% random sample is used to train the model. This cross-validation
approach ensures that the label (SPLC hate crime data) is always a sample. While the model optim-
ization itself is not including spatial relationships (this would be against randomness) we tested the
prediction result of the ANN against the original data collected by SPLC using a spatial lag
regression model, see below. This determines a pseudo R 2-value that considers spatial relationships
in the regression.

3.1. Model data

We incorporated 454 demographic and economic variables expressed as percentages, including
attributes such as income groups, veteran status, education by male and female, race and race
change between 2000 and 2010, age groups by male and female and its change between 2000
and 2010, household composition, as shown in Table S1. A sample of these hate crime data pre-
dicted the probability of hate crimes in a specific location using an Artificial Neural Network
(ANN). We scraped and geocoded data on hate & extremism about hate crimes for labelling and
hate groups (Southern Poverty Law Center 2018) from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
data set[downloaded in 2017] (Southern Poverty Law Center 2017). Demographic data came
from the US Department of commerce decennial census and five-year American Community Sur-
vey downloaded from National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) (Manson et al.
2018) and data on police officer deaths in the line of duty from the officer down memorial page
(ODMP) (The Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP) 2018). We verified our analysis with the
FBI hate crime statistics (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2017).
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was an accessible source for hate crime data that did
not aggregate cases at the state level. At the time of downloading, the website listed hate crimes
including a date and postal address on their website. This database, is no longer available on the
SPLC website. However, the SPLC recorded the data continuously in the past. The relative location,
the postal address, of each hate crime is geo-coded to an absolute point location with latitude and
longitude coordinates making it usable in a geographic information system (GIS) or spatial data-
base. During geo-coding, several addresses could not be located definitively and were discarded.
From the 4118 recorded hate crimes in the SPLC database, 3958 could be geo-coded and 2554
were used in the analysis after filtering. The data was collected between 16th January 2003 and
15th May 2015, to get the yearly average of 207 we divided by 12.33 (years).
Table S2 shows all hate crime types according to the SPLC database. From these types we only
consider vandalism (1377 cases), assault (619), harassment (172), intimidation (111), threat (98),
arson murder (74), cross burnings (45) and bombings (6) as those have corresponding categories
in the FBI hate crime statistics which we use for verification, see section Validation data: FBI
hate crime statistics. The SPLC hate crime types legal developments, leafleting, rally, intelligence
and hateitude are excluded from our analysis because those are either not actual crimes (such as
a rally) or the postal address may differ significantly from the actual location of the crime (such
as legal developments).
In Table S3, we present other data sets on hate crimes that include spatial information from
official and non-governmental (NGO) sources. To our knowledge, two NGOs collect and distribute
data on hate crimes, The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC). Official datasets are published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Uniform
Crime Reporting (UCR), see section below, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in the National
Crime Victim Survey (NCVS). We discuss all four datasets as they seem to be widely used in the
literature (Adamczyk et al. 2014; Grattet and Jenness 2008) based on the five different criteria of
accessibility, temporal scale, geographic scale, the number of incidents, and level of aggregation.
796 M. JENDRYKE AND S. CHARLES MCCLURE

All data sets are accessible, but a noticeable difference is the number of cases collected by NGOs
and official sources. While FBI UCR data are gathered from police departments in participating
states and BJS NCVS through random sampling techniques in the US census, the SPLC and
ADL can only rely on public information. The SPLC however, has the advantage of collecting
data on hate crimes with high spatial resolution and enough temporal overlap between 2004 and
2015. A disadvantage of the BJS NCVS is the spatial unit of analysis and the lack of location infor-
mation to geo-reference cases. BJS NCVS only mentions the site of an incident, such as ‘shopping
mall’. FBI UCR has similar disadvantages as they aggregate data to sub-national units, not suitable
for a more granular spatial analysis. The ADL collects data by city rather than census places.
We include hate group data collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center in this analysis
(Southern Poverty Law Center 2018). The SPLC categorizes and observes the hate groups and
adds them to their database. The SPLC records each hate group as a point with latitude and longi-
tude coordinates (n=717), and only mentions the hate group type, not its number of members or
date of establishment. This is inaccurate as a hate group may draw members from far away, and its
range of actions may cover a larger territory than can be depicted with a point.
The Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP) collects data about police officers that died in the line
of duty since the 1800s (The Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP) 2018). The ODMP provides
each case with coordinates, which makes it suitable for our approach and may give insights, whether
an area is prone to crimes and violence. We selected two subsets: one from 2000 to 2009 (n=1653)
and one from 2010 to 2019 (n=1260) to have the most relevant cases in our model.
The Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation (ISRDI) at the University of Minnesota
provides demographic and survey data through the National Historical Geographic Information
System (NHGIS), in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) (Manson et al. 2018).
We retrieved the decennial census data for 2000 and 2010, as this allows us to calculate variables
about temporal change. The American Community Survey (ACS) data gives information about
attributes like veteran status or household income. Table S1 presents all the subcategories with
description. Each dataset has limitations as they are provided either at the point level or as areas
of the shape of administrative units such as census tracts. The census data were converted to relative
numbers to avoid telling the ANN about total population; additional predictive variables were cal-
culated from the raw census numbers.

3.2. Data discretization

Data discretization was the strategy we adopted to mitigate some of the inherent problems of sparse
data. Data discretization using a DGGS allowed us to integrate uncertain data from different sources
into a consistent surface, subdivided into information units. The relationship of certain attributes
such as hate crimes and hate groups may exhibit different patterns of spatial dependency at different
scales (Openshaw 1983). For example, the area of influence of a event such as a hate crime is uncer-
tain (Zhao, Kwan, and Zhou 2018) and the neighborhood effect is unclear (Kwan 2018). We dis-
cussed this in another paper titled ‘Mapping Crime – Hate crimes and hate groups in the USA:
A spatial analysis with gridded data’ (Jendryke and McClure 2019), binning data was the strategy
we adopted to deal not only with the problem of uncertain areas of influence but uncertainty in
locational information concerning events.
This data discretization strategy was realized by an icosahedral aperture 3 DGGS with hexagonal
cells at four different cell sizes. The resulting beehive-like pattern is an approximation to circular
sampling, built as a hierarchical structure in which center points at lower resolution cells are
also the centers of higher resolution cells. This consistency allows for the formation of a system
of spatial units linked together across scales. For example, the hate crime locations were approxi-
mate; these stochastic events were initially treated as discrete points, but joined to DGGS cells
for analysis given the locational uncertainty of the data. The multi-resolution approach, based
on the DGGS system also enabled us to run the analysis at different scales. Granted, an analysis
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 797

for the USA could have been done with a localized grid, properly projected to the USA, but our goal
is to present a methodology for sparse data that would work globally without the need for
adjustments.
Discrete global grids are standardized (Purss et al. 2016) and have certain advantages over other
forms of data binning. The shape of the cells is irrelevant; triangles or quads would also be possible
but we chose the hexagonal cells to be closer to a circular shape when modeling patterns of spatial
autocorrelation. Moreover, DGGSs have a strong indexing schema which allows fast access to infor-
mation, as well as fast access to cell parents, children, and neighbours thus reducing computational
complexity and simplifying data pre-processing. In addition, machine learning can more efficiently
process structured input data such as images or tables with columns and rows. The idea here is the
leverage the potential of machine learning by preparing data in a format that is readable by basic ML
algorithms. While computer vision takes raster images as an input, a feed forward network can pro-
cess tabularized data as well. The cells of the DGGS are a way to create this structured table where
each row is a cell, representing the spatial component in two columns for latitude and longitude
along with other attributes in columns that describe the cell in terms of demography, social and
economic factors or other phenomena, see section on ‘Artificial Neural Network (ANN)’ and
‘Model data’. The selected cell sizes have a refinement of sqrt (3), i.e. cells of a lower resolution
are 1.72 times larger. This stepping is sufficient for our study, as we wanted to avoid too small
or too big jumps from one resolution to the next but keeping the factor consistent.

3.3. Calculated parameters

As race may play a crucial role in predicting hate crimes, we calculated the Shannon diversity index
(SDI) and the evenness index (EI) for 2000 and 2010 (Shannon and Weaver 1964). This is based on
racial information in the demographic data. These indices reveal rather simplistically the diversity
or evenness of a given area. The diversity index considers the number of races and the number of
individuals for each census racial category. In theory, the artificial neural network should be able to
identify the correlations between races if raw population counts are used in the model estimation.
We calculate SDI and EI indices based on raw census numbers, with this equation,


SDI = − (pi × ln pi )

where p is the relative number of individuals of each race divided by the total number of samples.
The EI is the SDI divided by the maximum SDI.
Another calculated parameter is the number of hate crimes in neighboring cells. This parameter
is a way to estimate spatial dependence and neighboring effects between incidents. In crime
research and crime prediction, knowledge of previous crimes is often used (Rummens, Hardyns,
and Pauwels 2017) to make a prediction about future crimes. As we deal with very sparse data, a
thorough temporal analysis that also includes geography is not possible. However, we can achieve
a spatial co-occurrence indicator by summing the hate crime cases in neighboring cells for a cell
under observation. As we deal with a hexagonal grid, the sum of all hate crimes in the six neighbor-
ing cells is used in this calculated parameter.
Looking at the raw hate crime counts as reported by the SPLC, we see that the cases over all cells
follow a power-law probability distribution. Instead of taking the raw count of incidents, we mul-
tiply the hate crime count per cell by two and take the natural logarithm of the result. This modifi-
cation of the so-called label minimizes the effect that few cells have a high number of recorded hate
crimes while many cells have only a few reported incidents. Cells that have zero reported hate
crimes still have zero hate crimes. This transformation is reversed once the model estimation
and prediction of hate crime incidents is completed using e and dividing by 2.
All datasets mentioned above are stored in a spatial database. Each attribute or group of attri-
butes is joined with the cells of a DGGS by a unique identifier, as described in the next section.
798 M. JENDRYKE AND S. CHARLES MCCLURE

The result is a large table where each row is a DGGS cell and each column is an attribute. Spatial
information is transferred to the model by using the latitude and longitude information of each
cell’s center point. This structured format is suitable for an ANN. We applied a multi-scale
approach and processed these tables for DGGS cells with different diameters. Altogether, 454 attri-
butes were collected and calculated as listed in Table S1.

3.4. Validation data: FBI hate crime statistics

To verify our results against external data, we compared our predicted counts of hate crimes with
the official FBI hate crime statistics using spatial regression at the state-level. In 1990, the US Con-
gress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act (28 U.S.C. § 534) to require the attorney general to collect
information on hate crimes. The Hate Crime Statistics Act definition of hate crimes is ‘crimes that
manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.’ The Uni-
form Crime Reporting (UCR) is the mechanism to record hate crimes and while the data is public,
a case-by-case dataset with hate crime type and a postal address that could be geo-coded is not
accessible. Unfortunately, the public version of the FBI hate crime statistics lacks sufficient spatial
information to carry out a thorough geographic investigation of the data. Instead, the data is aggre-
gated at the state-level. For the presented study, we could download the data from 2011 to 2016,
which temporally overlaps with the SPLC data, but the category names for hate crime are slightly
different.
The categories in the original FBI hate crime statistics dataset are shown in direct matching to
the SPLC hate crime types in Table S2. Considered are those that match the SPLC categories: mur-
der and non-negligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson,
destruction/damage/vandalism, and crimes against society.

4. Results and analysis

After preparing the aggregated datasets in the DGGS, we executed the Artificial Neural Network
(ANN) 20 times at all four different cell sizes between ∼10 km and ∼50 km to capture and identify
scale effects and to cross-validate and account for model uncertainties. All cells covering contiguous
USA are randomly split 50:50 in each iteration for model training and testing, the results for model
accuracy and precision are visualized in a two-panel box-plot diagram. We present our findings by
selecting the results closest to the mean pseudo R2-value as determined by the spatial lag regression
model and map the results for the predicted number of crimes per year, a risk map showing
exposure to such incidents normalized by population, and a state-level map verifying our results
with the official FBI hate crime statistics.
We visualize the accuracy and precision results of the model iterations in box-plot diagrams, pre-
sented in Figure 3 with additional information in Table S5 and Table S6. Panel A shows the pseudo
R 2-values as determined by a spatial lag regression model (SLRM), for the selected cell sizes. The
mean pseudo R2-value of 0.4631 for cells with a diameter of ∼10 km rises to 0.7888 for cells
with a diameter of ∼50 km. The narrow whiskers of the box plots indicate that the model accuracy
is within a standard deviation of 0.0084 relatively stable over multiple iterations. Thus, the predic-
tive accuracy of our model becomes greater with increasing DGGS cell sizes. We expect this, as the
ratio between labeled cells that are not zero – cells that have no records of hate crimes – increases
with larger cell diameter. A high pseudo R2-value means that our location prediction is accurate, but
to evaluate the model precision, we must consider the total number of predicted hate crimes.
Panel B of Figure 3 shows the corresponding model precision by visualizing the spread of the
total number of predicted hate crimes per year. The model predicted the number of hate crimes
per year with more variation than expected. With smaller cell sizes, the model precision decreases.
The median of the predictions for cells with a diameter of ∼50 km and ∼29 km was only off by −7
and 1 hate crime(s) from 207 cases per year reported by SPLC (red line). At the smallest cell
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 799

Figure 3. The artificial neural network ran 20 times at each cell size using a 50% sample of all cells covering contiguous USA.
Panel A on the left shows the pseudo R2-values of the spatial regression between the recorded Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC) hate crimes counts against the model prediction. The box plots are rather narrow, suggesting stable accuracy for all
20 iterations and cell sizes. With decreasing cell size, the accuracy of the model decreases. Panel B on the right shows the pre-
dicted number of hate crimes. The precision shows more variability; especially at cells size ∼29 km. With decreasing cell size, the
model precision decreases as it tends to predict more hate crimes than actually recorded by SPLC.

diameters, the model predicts more than SPLC reported. This imprecision is due to the quality of
the point level data put into the model. As cells get smaller, the associated attributes for neighboring
cells become more similar; therefore, the model also predicts hate crimes in these neighboring areas
regardless of the presence or absence of actual incidents in those cells.
From all 80 runs of the model we selected one to produce maps. While it would be feasible to
create the average prediction of all 20 iterations at each DGGS cell size we select the one that is clo-
sest to the mean pseudo R2-value of that cell size. As we assume that the actual number of hate
crimes is higher than what is reported by the SPLC and show a map with a cell size of ∼17 km
here, maps of the other cell sizes are Figure S1, Figure S2, and Figure S3. The model is ∼59% correct
and the spread of predicted incidents per year is within one standard deviation of just 18 incidents,
thus balancing precision and accuracy with spatial resolution.
Figure 4 shows the predicted number of hate crimes per year for model run 13 at cells size 17 km.
This run’s pseudo R2-value (0.5904) was the same as the mean of all pseudo R2-values for the cell
size (Table S5). Darker shades of blue indicate a higher number of incidents, while lighter shades
mean less or no incidents in grey. The highest number of predicted hate crimes was 5.88 incidents
per year for a cell in New York.
From the map in Figure 4, it becomes apparent that the predicted hate crime distribution is not
random; clusters of higher density incident predictions are noticeable in the large urban agglomera-
tions from Boston to Washington DC, Detroit to Chicago, and the larger Metropolitan areas on the
west coast. The prediction however, does not show hate crimes in high density urban areas alone,
but also in the southern states extending from Kansas City to Houston in the West to Atlanta and
Norfolk in the East. This visual pattern may suggest that hate crimes strongly correlate with popu-
lation density, but a spatial lag regression model between total population and the hate crime
records from SPLC and alone results in a pseudo R2-value of 0.5542 while a regression between
800 M. JENDRYKE AND S. CHARLES MCCLURE

Figure 4. This map shows the number of predicted hate crimes per year at DGGS cells size ∼17 km. We selected one artificial
neural network run where the pseudo R2-value is closest to the mean of all iterations at this cell size as the result. Dark blue
indicates more hate crimes, lighter shades less, and grey no hate crimes. The highest predicted number of hate crimes per
year is 5.88 in New York City.

total population and the model prediction results in a pseudo R2-value of 0.6366, see Table S7. This
prompts a comparison of the predicted number of hate crimes with the underlying total population
to estimate the risk of experiencing a hate crime.
The map in Figure 5 shows the exposure to hate crime incidents by normalizing the prediction
results shown in Figure 4 by the total population at cell size ∼17 km, maps of other cell sizes are in
Figure S4, Figure S5, and Figure S6. Darker tones of red mean a higher frequency of up to 19 hate
crime incidents per 10,000 people per year, while brighter tones mean fewer incidents per 10,000
people per year, and gray zero predicted hate crimes.
When normalizing the yearly predicted number of hate crimes with the underlying total popu-
lation variations become visible, urban centers do not have highest exposure to hate crime. Looking
at Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Atlanta, or Los Angeles we see a radial pattern of increasing
exposure to hate crimes away from the center. The risk of experiencing a hate crime, according
to our model, is higher towards the fringes of urban areas and between major agglomerations,
for a detailed map see Figure S7. However, we must verify our prediction results against an inde-
pendent dataset that has not been used in the model estimation.
A suitable source for independent verification is the FBI hate crime statistics; a dataset aggre-
gated at the state-level that contains hate crime categories that can be matched to the SPLC data.
While the FBI dataset contains 6316 hate crimes per year, the SPLC recorded only 207 hate
crimes per year. To verify our findings, we summarize the prediction results of the ANN for
cells with a diameter of ∼17 km per state (independent variable) and regressed it with the
FBI hate crime statistics (dependent variable) using a spatial lag regression model (SLRM),
see Figure 6.
Out of 48 states and the District of Columbia that we used as units of analysis for verification
26% (13) had residual values that were greater or lesser than one standard deviation from the
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 801

Figure 5. Normalizing the predicted number of hate crimes by total population results in a risk/exposure map. The map shows
the risk of experiencing a hate crime; here for cells with ∼17 km diameter. Dark red indicates a higher risk of experiencing a hate
crime, lighter shades less, and grey indicates little to no risk.

mean, suggesting a relatively high match between the model and the official FBI hate crime statistics
for the time period tested. The states that are within one standard deviation account for ∼60% of the
total population of the USA. Overall at the state level, the spatial lag regression model (SLRM)
between our model prediction and the FBI hate crime statistics shows a strong fit with a pseudo
R2-value of 0.7988, see Table S7.

5. Discussion and conclusions

We presented a theoretical framework that integrates data in a Discrete Global Grid System
(DGGS), combines this data structure with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to predict sparse
and uncertain events, and validates the results using spatial lag regression models (SLRM). From
theory, we moved to a practical implementation that hierarchically bins demographic, economic,
social attributes to grid cells of the DGGS. After feeding the DGGS with data we are able to
train the ANN to make spatial predictions about a social event. This framework, however, is also
able to ingest data from other sensors, such as earth observation imagery, social media data, or
the Internet of Things (IoT), making it a generic approach to predict and correlate all kinds of
(sparse) geographic phenomena. In our previous research on the relationship between hate groups
and hate crimes in (Jendryke and McClure 2019) we realized that the prediction of hate crimes is
complex and that more factors are at play. Hence, we developed the presented methodology to over-
come the problems of data integration and machine learning. The DGGS that was used in the pre-
vious research proved to be a very suitable platform for application.
The data on hate crime incidents is uncertain and sparse, incidents are under-reported and the
very term ‘hate crime’ is loosely defined, however despite these limitations it is possible to predict
spatial patterns of hate crimes. These results need to be treated and interpreted with care as the
reporting and recording of hate crimes is a politically contentious issue, undermining empirical
802 M. JENDRYKE AND S. CHARLES MCCLURE

Figure 6. To verify our results, we aggregate our predicted number of hate crimes at the state level. The residual of the spatial
regression between the official FBI hate crime statistics and the model prediction shows that only 13 states have a standard
deviation of more than ±1. Our results, while being overall lower in total number of predicted hate crimes, are 79% congruent
with the FBI hate crime statistics.

investigations of this phenomenon. Analyzing the data on hate crimes from the Southern Poverty
Law Center (SPLC) predicted aggregate occurrences at multiple scales, achieving a predictive
capacity of up to 79%, for cells with a diameter of ∼50 km and 59% for cells with a diameter of
∼17 km. Our predictive maps show areas at risk of experiencing hate crime and are a guide to action
for the police, civil society organizations, communities, and others combating violence and hate.
Hate crimes are not spatially random, nor do they follow the population distribution, instead cer-
tain areas have a higher risk of experiencing hate crimes. One of the limitations and why further
inspection of the prediction results is hampered is the fact that verification data at this level gran-
ularity does not exist. The only official source about hate crimes comes from the FBI and is only
provided in state aggregated numbers at the national scale.
The areas with the highest exposure are those where urban areas transition from higher density
to less urbanized (rural) areas. But an ANN only identifies correlations, it does not spell out one or
few variables that explain events like hate crimes, thus no single variable is important. Even if we
cannot say whether the selected variables are causal or just correlation, we conclude that machine
learning can predict hate crimes at some degree of accuracy and precision. At the same time, a hex-
agonal grid replaces administrative boundaries as a unit of analysis and aggregation of uncertain
data rather than distinct cases or neighborhoods. The results for hate crimes look promising,
and the method will be applied to other types of events in future research.
This research can be improved with the addition of more comprehensive datasets on hate crimes
at high spatial and temporal resolution, as we have not fully considered time in the presented study.
Our method is not limited to the USA, nor is it fixed on predicting hate crimes per se. This method
may be useful to make predictions about other phenomena such as epidemics, trade, migration, or
conflicts where the data is sparse and uncertain by using other datasets and other labels that are
relevant to the phenomenon. The results of the ANN model also require careful interpretation
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH 803

and the prediction numbers should not be taken as a reference for hate crimes, but as a guide to
policymaking and civic engagement.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our colleagues, acquaintances, families and reviewers for their comments, criticisms, and
support. Identifying information will be added after the review process.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Part of the data are not publicly available due to SPLC not offering data on hate crimes anymore. The data that sup-
port the findings of this study are available from the authors upon reasonable request.

ORCID
Michael Jendryke http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7923-283X
Stephen Charles McClure http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2520-9682

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Appendix

The Appendix document with supplementary material will be available at https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2021.

1886356.