In this and the next chapter, we describe seven tools for identifying clusters of crime
incidents. The discussion has been divided into two chapters primarily because of the
length of the discussion. This chapter discusses the concept of a hot spot and four hot spot
techniques: the mode, fuzzy mode, nearest neighbor hierarchical clustering, and riskadjusted
nearest neighbor hierarchical clustering. The next chapter discusses STAC, the
K-means algorithm, and Anselin’s Local Moran statistics. However, the seven techniques
should be seen as a continuum of approaches towards identifying hot spots.