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Why Are You Here? Modeling Illicit Massage Business Location Characteristics With Machine Learning, Anna White, Seth Guikema, Bridgette Carr
Why Are You Here? Modeling Illicit Massage Business Location Characteristics With Machine Learning, Anna White, Seth Guikema, Bridgette Carr
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Illicit massage businesses are a venue for sex and labor trafficking in the United States. Though many of their locations are made publicly available through online advertising, little is known about why they choose to locate where they do. In this work, we use inferential modeling to better understand the spatial distribution of illicit massage businesses within the U.S. Based on addresses web-scraped weekly from online advertisements over 6 months, we modeled illicit massage business prevalence at the census tract and county levels. We used publicly available data to characterize census tracts and counties, finding that the state in which …