Abstract
Automatic geocoding methods have become popular in recent years, facilitating the study of the association between health outcomes and the place of living. However, rather few studies have evaluated geocoding quality, with most of them being performed in the US and Europe. This article aims to compare the quality of three automatic online geocoding tools against a reference method. A subsample of 300 handwritten addresses from hospital records was geocoded using Bing, Google Earth, and Google Maps. Match rates were higher (> 80%) for Google Maps and Google Earth compared with Bing. However, the accuracy of the addresses was better for Bing with a larger proportion (> 70%) of addresses with positional errors below 20m. Generally, performance did not vary for each method for different socioeconomic status. Overall, the methods showed an acceptable, but heterogeneous performance, which may be a warning against the use of automatic methods without assessing quality in other municipalities, particularly in Chile and Latin America.
Highlights
Knowing the spatial distribution of certain attributes, health determinants or conditions of individuals or populations has helped researchers and policy-makers to monitor and to understand some important relationships between public health and people’s environments 1
As we used two different techniques to build the reference method, we explored the differences between positional errors of Global Positional System (GPS) and Street View by locating the known locations found in GPS in Street View
Considering socioeconomic status, we found large and significant differences in the match rates between the methods for addresses in the low and medium socioeconomic status (Tables 4 and 5), whereas we found no differences in match rates when comparing socioeconomic status for each method
Summary
Knowing the spatial distribution of certain attributes, health determinants or conditions of individuals or populations has helped researchers and policy-makers to monitor and to understand some important relationships between public health and people’s environments 1. The transformation of a written address into spatial information, i.e., geocoding, is essential and has become an important methodology to locate people and services, among others [4,8,11,12]. Address geocoding describes the process of spatially locating an address by finding the coordinate that best fits its physical location on a map [3,9,10,11,13]. Geocoders are the service providers that receive the query address, process the geocoding task, and output the coordinate results. A set of addresses are queried automatically and the results are retrieved, including metadata indicators of quality along with the coordinates [7,10,11,12,13]
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