A component that is a form, not the city

GCP-Poisson at rank 3. Two components read like a city: one peaks in the late evening and loads on theft; one peaks around midnight and loads on battery. Both rise and fall smoothly, with a trough in the small hours.

The third spikes at exactly 00:00 and 12:00 — together a fifth of the component — while 05:00 carries about half a percent. Nothing in a city does that. A form does: when nobody knows the time of an offence, it is recorded as midnight or noon. Its second crime type is deceptive practice, about a quarter of the component — exactly the category whose victim discovers it later.

A component is a pattern in the numbers you were given. Whether it is a pattern in the world is your question, not the method’s. The honest fix is to treat those cells as missing.