Identifying Venues for Female Commercial Sex Work Using Spatial Analysis of Geocoded Advertisements

Abstract

Despite being widely visible on the web, Internet-promoted commercial sex work has so far attracted limited attention from the side of researchers. Current studies outline the issues that new forms of sex work are associated with, however, very little is known to date about their spatial manifestation. In this research we follow the environmental perspective in spatial analysis of crime and deviance with the assumption that the location of venues for provision of commercial sex work can be modeled via the algorithms trained on the distribution of possible correlates in the proximity to the existing venues. Visualization of the acquired results is presented herein along with the errors and score metrics for evaluation of the applicability of specific methods of machine learning. The paper is concluded with the estimation of potential extensions and peculiarities of data used in the research.