Hit-Rate
Definition
Performance metric for a geoprofile: the percentage of the search area that has to be examined before the anchor is found, lower is better.
- Metric type
- Geoprofile search efficiency measure
- Expressed as
- Percentage of search area examined
- Better performance
- Lower hit-rate value
- Depends on
- Offender's true anchor location relative to profile
Common questions
How is hit-rate calculated in practice?+
It is the proportion of the total search area, ranked by the geoprofile's priority scoring, that investigators would need to search sequentially before reaching the cell containing the offender's actual anchor point.
Why do different geographic profiling models produce different hit-rates for the same case?+
Models weight distance decay, buffer zones, and crime site distribution differently, so their priority surfaces diverge, and a model whose assumptions better match the offender's true spatial behaviour will yield a lower hit-rate.
Related terms
- Anchor Point
- The offender's spatial base of operations, most often the home, sometimes the workplace or a partner's address. The point geographical profiling is...
- Buffer Zone
- The area immediately around an offender's anchor point where offence probability is suppressed because the offender avoids committing crimes near recognisable locations...
- Distance-Decay Function
- The empirical pattern that offence frequency declines with distance from the offender's anchor point, after a small zone of avoidance close to...
- Jeopardy Surface
- The probability map output of geographic profiling, rendered as a colour-coded topographic display where high-probability zones for the anchor point appear in...
- Routine Activity Theory
- A criminological framework developed by Cohen and Felson (1979) that explains property crime as the product of three converging elements: a motivated...