Clustering Hoax Fire Calls Using Evolutionary Computation Technology

Abstract

Hoax fire calls put an unnecessary burden on service resources and endanger life by making personnel and appliances unavailable for genuine incidents. Identifying the higher risk areas of hoax fire calls will be helpful in reducing the hoax calls In this paper, the hoax caller is located by a 6-figure map reference with two lead letters. A GA based evolutionary computation technology is proposed and applied to cluster the hoax calls into several groups according to their locations. The number of clusters is fixed at each GA run, and it is incremented by 1 for each iteration until the desired fitness (quality of the clustering partition) is achieved. The novel fitness function allows each cluster geographically covering a similar size of the areas and avoids empty clusters occur. The algorithm is then applied to the identification of higher risk areas of hoax fire calls. A spatial visualization is also used to display the clustering results in which three higher risk areas are clearly identified.