Text Mining in R: Death Row Prior Occupations

Text Mining in R: Death Row Prior Occupations

By David Lettier

We collected, parsed, and mined the prior occupations of current death row inmates. Interesting patterns discovered were the large portion of blue-collar occupations (most notably laborer) and more rare prior occupations such as computer operator and jewelry designer. An interesting hypothesis test would be the correlation between being on death row and having been a laborer. The SVD computation could be used for information retrieval allowing one to search for similar current inmates by some prior occupation query. Further analysis could include plotting the amount of each prior occupation seen per year.