Abstract One of the central topics in crime research, and one in which discrete choice modelling has been relatively recently introduced, is the study of where offenders choose to commit crime. Since the introduction of this approach in 2003, it has become relatively popular and used in over 25 published studies covering a range of crime types and study areas. However, in most of these analyses the conditional logit has been used which assumes offenders are homogenous in their offence location preferences. This is despite various research finding offenders vary in their decision-making criteria. As such, while three recent studies (Townsley et al., 2016; Frith et al., 2017; Long et al., 2018) used the mixed logit and found some evidence of preference heterogeneity between offenders, there are still open questions regarding its nature. To this end, this study uses the latent class (and mixed and conditional logit) to examine the offence location choices of serious acquisitive crime offenders in York (UK). In particular, to understand how the spatial preferences differ between offenders and if there are any observable sources. Like the previous studies, this analysis identifies the presence of preference heterogeneity. This study also finds that the latent class and mixed logit equally fit the data though there are some differences in the results. These findings and other factors therefore raise questions for future crime location choice research regarding the appropriate model for these types of analyses and the true underlying nature of offender preferences.

中文翻译：

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模拟关于进攻地点选择的味觉异质性

摘要犯罪研究的中心主题之一是对罪犯选择犯罪的地方进行研究，最近相对较早地引入了离散选择模型。自从2003年采用这种方法以来，它已经变得相对流行，并已在25项涵盖各种犯罪类型和研究领域的已发表研究中使用。但是，在大多数这些分析中，都使用了有条件的对数，它假定罪犯在其犯罪地点偏好方面是同质的。尽管有各种研究发现，罪犯的决策标准各不相同。因此，尽管最近的三项研究（Townsley等人，2016; Frith等人，2017; Long等人，2018）使用混合logit并发现了罪犯之间偏好异质性的一些证据，但仍存在关于其犯罪偏好的异议性质。为此，这项研究使用潜伏类（以及有条件和有条件的对数）来检查约克（英国）严重可采犯罪者的犯罪地点选择。特别是要了解罪犯之间的空间偏好如何不同以及是否有任何可观察的来源。像以前的研究一样，该分析确定了偏好异质性的存在。这项研究还发现，尽管结果存在一些差异，但潜在类和混合对数同样适合数据。因此，这些发现和其他因素为未来的犯罪地点选择研究提出了有关这些类型的分析的适当模型以及罪犯偏好的真正内在本质的问题。