Spherical similarity explorer for comparative case analysis

Comparative Case Analysis (CCA) is an important tool for criminal investigation and crime theory extraction. It analyzes the commonalities and differences between a collection of crime reports in order to understand crime patterns and identify abnormal cases. A big challenge of CCA is the data processing and exploration. Traditional manual approach can no longer cope with the increasing volume and complexity of the data. In this paper we introduce a novel visual analytics system, Spherical Similarity Explorer (SSE) that automates the data processing process and provides interactive visualizations to support the data exploration. We illustrate the use of the system with uses cases that involve real world application data and evaluate the system with criminal intelligence analysts.