Journal article
Uncertainty in geospatial health: challenges and opportunities ahead
Annals of epidemiology, v 65, pp 15-30
Jan 2022
PMID: 34656750
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Uncertainty is not always well captured, understood, or modeled properly, and can bias the robustness of complex relationships, such as the association between the environment and public health through exposure, estimates of geographic accessibility and cluster detection, to name a few.
We review current challenges and future opportunities as geospatial data and analyses are applied to the field of public health. We are particularly interested in the sources of uncertainty in geospatial data and how this uncertainty may propagate in spatial analysis.
We present opportunities to reduce the magnitude and impact of uncertainty. Specifically, we focus on (1) the use of multiple reference data sources to reduce geocoding errors, (2) the validity of online geocoders and how confidentiality (e.g., HIPAA) may be breached, (3) use of multiple reference data sources to reduce geocoding errors, (4) the impact of geoimputation techniques on travel estimates, (5) residential mobility and how it affects accessibility metrics and clustering, and (6) modeling errors in the American Community Survey. Our paper discusses how to communicate spatial and spatiotemporal uncertainty, and high-performance computing to conduct large amounts of simulations to ultimately increase statistical robustness for studies in public health.
Our paper contributes to recent efforts to fill in knowledge gaps at the intersection of spatial uncertainty and public health.
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Details
- Title
- Uncertainty in geospatial health: challenges and opportunities ahead
- Creators
- Eric M. Delmelle - University of North Carolina at CharlotteMichael R. Desjardins - Johns Hopkins UniversityPaul Jung - University of North Carolina at CharlotteClaudio Owusu - Centers for Disease Control and PreventionYu Lan - University of North Carolina at CharlotteAlexander Hohl - University of UtahColine Dony - American Association of Geographers
- Publication Details
- Annals of epidemiology, v 65, pp 15-30
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Urban Health Collaborative
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000726988400002
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85119407272
- Other Identifier
- 991021874549904721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Public, Environmental & Occupational Health