Participants of this study were 349 sexual offenders released from a prison in northern Taiwan in 1995, and we follow all cases from the time of release to December 31, 2003. 18 risk predictors with statistic significance are selected to construct a artificial neural network (ANN) model for the sexual offender recidivism prediction. Then we examined the predict ability of the ANN model by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, and compare with other common used screening tools for prediction of sex offender recidivism, i.e. RRASOR, static-99, and MnSOST-R. The area under the ROC curve for ANN model is 0.772 (95% CI: 0.683~0.862, p<0.001), which reach the statistic significance. Comparing with other screening tools, ANN model got better predict ability. It means that ANN is a considerable method for further research.
Participants of this study were 349 sexual offenders released from a prison in northern Taiwan in 1995, and we follow all cases from the time of release to December 31, 2003. 18 risk predictors with statistic significance are selected to construct a artificial neural network (ANN) model for the sexual offender recidivism prediction. Then we examined the predict ability of the ANN model by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, and compare with other common used screening tools for prediction of sex offender recidivism, i.e. RRASOR, static-99, and MnSOST-R. The area under the ROC curve for ANN model is 0.772 (95% CI: 0.683~0.862, p<0.001), which reach the statistic significance. Comparing with other screening tools, ANN model got better predict ability. It means that ANN is a considerable method for further research.