Citation

Ozonoff A, Jeffery C, Manjourides J, White LF, Pagano M. Int. J. Health Geogr. 2007; 6: 52.

Affiliation

Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, 655 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA. aozonoff@bu.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group - BMC)

DOI

10.1186/1476-072X-6-52

PMID

18042281

PMCID

PMC2213641

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Aggregation of spatial data is intended to protect privacy, but some effects of aggregation on spatial methods have not yet been quantified. METHODS: We generated 3,000 spatial data sets and evaluated power of detection at 12 different levels of aggregation using the spatial scan statistic implemented in SaTScan v6.0. RESULTS: Power to detect clusters decreased from nearly 100% when using exact locations to roughly 40% at the coarsest level of spatial resolution. CONCLUSION: Aggregation has the potential for obfuscation.

Language: en