TY - JOUR AU - Chen, Chien-Chou AU - Chuang, Jen-Hsiang AU - Wang, Da-Wei AU - Wang, Chien-Min AU - Lin, Bo-Cheng AU - Chan, Ta-Chien PY - 2017/11/08 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Balancing geo-privacy and spatial patterns in epidemiological studies JF - Geospatial Health JA - Geospat Health VL - 12 IS - 2 SE - Original Articles DO - 10.4081/gh.2017.573 UR - https://www.geospatialhealth.net/gh/article/view/573 SP - AB - 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. ER -