Objectives

The burgeoning field of individual level crime location choice research has required increasingly large datasets to model complex relationships between the attributes of potential crime locations and offenders’ choices. This study tests methods of sampling aiming to overcome computational challenges involved in the use of such large datasets.

Methods

Using police data on 38,120 residential and non-residential burglary, commercial and personal robbery and extra-familial sex offense locations and the offenders’ pre-offense activity locations (e.g., home, family members’ homes and prior crime locations), and in the context of the conditional logit formulation of the discrete spatial choice model, we tested a novel method for importance sampling of alternatives. The method over-samples potential crime locations near to offenders’ activity locations that are more likely to be chosen for crime. We compared variants of this method with simple random sampling.

Results

Importance sampling produced results more consistent with those produced without sampling compared with simple random sampling, and provided considerable computational savings. There were strong relationships between the locations of offenders’ prior criminal and non-criminal activities and their crime locations.

Conclusions

Importance sampling from alternatives is a relatively simple and effective method that enables future studies to use larger datasets (e.g., with more variables, wider study areas, or more granular spatial or spatio-temporal units) to yield greater insights into crime location choice. By examining non-residential burglary and sexual offenses, in New Zealand, the substantive results represent a novel contribution to the growing literature on offenders’ spatial decision making.

中文翻译：

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重要性抽样的重要性：探索犯罪地点选择离散选择模型中的替代抽样方法

目标

个人层面犯罪地点选择研究的新兴领域需要越来越大的数据集来模拟潜在犯罪地点的属性与罪犯选择之间的复杂关系。这项研究测试了旨在克服使用此类大型数据集所涉及的计算挑战的抽样方法。

方法

使用关于 38,120 个住宅和非住宅入室盗窃、商业和个人抢劫以及家庭外性犯罪地点和犯罪者的犯罪前活动地点（例如，家、家庭成员的家和以前的犯罪地点）的警方数据，以及在在离散空间选择模型的条件 logit 公式的上下文中，我们测试了一种用于备选方案重要性采样的新方法。该方法对靠近罪犯活动地点的潜在犯罪地点进行过采样，这些地点更有可能被选为犯罪。我们将这种方法的变体与简单的随机抽样进行了比较。

结果

与简单随机抽样相比，重要性抽样产生的结果与未抽样产生的结果更一致，并提供了可观的计算节省。罪犯先前犯罪和非犯罪活动的地点与其犯罪地点之间存在密切关系。

结论

从备选方案中进行重要性抽样是一种相对简单而有效的方法，它使未来的研究能够使用更大的数据集（例如，具有更多变量、更广泛的研究区域或更细粒度的空间或时空单位），从而更深入地了解犯罪地点的选择。通过检查新西兰的非住宅入室盗窃和性犯罪，实质性结果代表了对不断增长的关于犯罪者空间决策的文献的新贡献。