Balancing geo-privacy and spatial patterns in epidemiological studies
Authors
Chien-Chou Chen – articles in this journalCenter for Geographic Information Science, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China.
Chien-Min Wang – articles in this journalCenter for Geographic Information Science, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei; Department of Geography, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China.
Bo-Cheng Lin – articles in this journalCenter for Geographic Information Science, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China.
Ta-Chien Chan – articles in this journalCorresponding author
EmailCenter for Geographic Information Science, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China.
To balance the protection of geo-privacy and the accuracy of spatial patterns, we developed a geo-spatial tool (GeoMasker) intended to mask the residential locations of patients or cases in a geographic information system (GIS). To elucidate the effects of geo-masking parameters, we applied 2010 dengue epidemic data from Taiwan testing the tool's performance in an empirical situation. The similarity of pre- and post-spatial patterns was measured by D statistics under a 95% confidence interval. In the empirical study, different magnitudes of anonymisation (estimated Kanonymity ‰¥10 and 100) were achieved and different degrees of agreement on the pre- and post-patterns were evaluated. The application is beneficial for public health workers and researchers when processing data with individuals' spatial information.
