Anonymisation of address coordinates for microlevel analyses of the built environment: a simulation study

BMJ Open
Christoph BuckIris Pigeot

Abstract

Data privacy is a major concern in spatial epidemiology because exact residential locations or parts of participants' addresses such as street or zip codes are used to perform geospatial analyses. To overcome this concern, different levels of aggregation such as census districts or zip code areas are mainly used, though any spatial aggregation leads to a loss of spatial variability. For the assessment of urban opportunities for physical activity that was conducted in the IDEFICS (Identification and prevention of dietary- and lifestyle-induced health effects in children and infants) study, macrolevel analyses were performed, but the use of exact residential addresses for micro-level analyses was not permitted by the responsible office for data protection. We therefore implemented a spatial blurring to anonymise address coordinates depending on the underlying population density. We added a standard Gaussian distributed error to individual address coordinates with the variance σ² depending on the population density and on the chosen k-anonymity. 1000 random point locations were generated and repeatedly blurred 100 times to obtain anonymised locations. For each location 1 km network-dependent neighbourhoods were used to calculate w...Continue Reading

References

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Citations

Nov 9, 2014·Journal of Urban Health : Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine·Christoph BuckIris Pigeot
Aug 17, 2016·American Journal of Preventive Medicine·Peter JamesFrancine Laden
Dec 13, 2019·The International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity·Christoph BuckUNKNOWN IDEFICS and the I.Family consortia

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Software Mentioned

spatstat
sp
- package
ArcGIS
SAS
R
package

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