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You Are Where?! Assessing Geocoding Accuracy and Implications for Health Studies Author: Andrew Hertz 1515 Clay St. Phone: 510-622-4521 Geocoding evaluations have been limited to measures of address matching success and have not assessed the positional accuracy of the geographic coordinate. As there is no "gold standard" geographic street database, this coordinate reflects the inaccuracies and biases inherent in both the street features and address data for a given street database. A comparison of the locations of geocoded addresses obtained from various street databases with locations obtained via GPS and aerial imagery provides a means to assess geographic accuracy. The implications of geographic inaccuracies on exposure and epidemiologic analyses, through misclassification or inaccurate distance metrics for example, can then be addressed. |