About 60 teams took part in the SAS Analytics Competition from 23-25 January 2015 to tackle the challenge of using analytics in law enforcement to address crime and policing problems more effectively.

Co-organised by SMU Business Intelligence & Analytics SIG, the participants were provided with data concerning crime incidents as well as supporting data.

Five teams made it to the finals where they presented their solutions to a panel of judges comprising government and industry experts.

In the end, a team of two final-year students from SMU School of Information Systems - Nicholas Li Jiacheng and Janice Koh Rui Ling - clinched the runner-up position.

The team focused on creating intuitive and interesting visualisations for its target audience comprising senior management in the crime fighting and crime prevention sector. Using a range of visualisation tools such as heat maps, line charts and correlation matrixes, the team was able to detect a consistent pattern in the crime rate in the United Kingdom over several years, and the types of housing targeted by criminals.

Said Nicholas Li, “We took part in this competition as we wanted to apply our skills and knowledge obtained in the field of analytics on a real case study. From this competition, we learnt how to evaluate visualisation models; some models look fancy and beautiful but do not provide meaningful insights, whereas something as simple as a line chart can immediately reveal a particular trend or pattern.”