Analysis of socioeconomic factors affecting crime in the European Union with robust methods

Crime that causes distrust in societies; Although it affects the society and the country's economy, it can cause both psychological and monetary costs in the society. The issue of crime is also important for ensuring sustainable development. Ensuring peace and justice in countries and institutions is one of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. In the current study, it is aimed to determine the socio-economic determinants of violence and property crimes for the member states of the European Union. For this purpose, Robust methods were used in practice. These methods are generally applied in data sets with outlier observations. Outlier observations can affect the estimators and cause unreliable estimation results. In the study, Robust Imputation Method was used to impute missing observations of some countries with missing observations on violence and property crime types, Robust Sparse Principal Components Analysis was used to reduce the dimension of the data set, and Robust Regression Analysis was used to estimate two models in which the dependent variables were violence and property crime rates. In the first part of the thesis, the concept of crime, its theories, the importance of crime in sustainable development and the literature study on the socioeconomic determinants of violence and property crimes are emphasized. In the second part, the methods used in the detection of outlier observations are discussed. In the third chapter, properties and types of robust estimators, multivariate estimators and Robust Regression Method are examined. In the application part, the data collected about the study were analyzed and reported. In the conclusion part, information about the results of the study, its contribution to the literature, further studies and the limits of the study are given. Keywords: Crime, Outlier Observation, Robust Imputation Method, Robust Sparse Principal Component Analysis, Robust Regression