An Investigation on the Rate of Crime in Sokoto State Using Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

Principal component analysis is a data analysis tools that is used to reduce the dimensionality of a large number of interrelated variables, while retaining as much of the information as possible. In this paper, PCA technique has been applied to know the number of principal components to be retained on the seven variables obtained from Criminal Investigation Department Sokoto State Police Headquarters Sokoto. Data analysis was carried out using NCSS and GESS 2007 Software. From the results, three Principal components have been retained using the Scree plot and Loading plot indicating that correlation exist between crimes against persons and crime against properties.