Reconstruction-aware urban crime analytics from incomplete judicial records using heterogeneous graph temporal imputation.

Abstract

Introduction: Incomplete judicial records constrain reliable crime analytics because missing attributes, heterogeneous case descriptions, mixed variable types, and imbalanced charge distributions reduce their analytical value. This study developed a reconstruction-aware framework for drug-crime charge classification from incomplete judicial records.

Methods: Drug-related judicial documents from Chengdu, China, covering 2014-2021 were screened, cleaned, and converted into structured person-level observations. The final dataset comprised 12,620 valid documents and 15,184 observations with 16 structured features. A Heterogeneous Graph Convolution Temporal Autoencoder (HetGConv-TAE) was developed to jointly model heterogeneous case-attribute relations and temporal changes in case composition. Performance was evaluated under 10%, 20%, and 30% controlled missingness, followed by XGBoost charge classification and SHAP interpretation.

Results: HetGConv-TAE achieved the best mean reconstruction performance across conventional, static graph, temporal, and relational graph baselines. XGBoost trained on HetGConv-TAE reconstructed data achieved weighted F1 scores close to 80% and ROC-AUC values above 90%. SHAP analysis identified drug weight, place category, and administrative district as the most influential predictors across charge categories.

Discussion: Combining label-excluded heterogeneous graph reconstruction, temporal encoding, downstream classification, and interpretable analysis improves the analytical usefulness of incomplete judicial archives. The framework is intended to support data-quality assessment and aggregate public-safety research rather than automated legal decision-making.