The Accuracy of Geocoding

The Accuracy of Geocoding depends on the input data and the reference data. The geocoding process determines the location of a point by interpolating from the coordinates or assigning same coordinates to adjacent points. The reference data sets used by geocoding software include discrete address location, areal units, street networks, and census enumerations. The accuracy of these methods varies greatly, but the most common ones are shown below.


The quality of geocoding outcomes depends on the quality of address inputs, as well as the land use model of the reference data set. The accuracy of the output is generally lower in rural areas than in urban areas. Addresses in rural areas have larger street segments and longer distances to public roads, which magnify interpolation errors. Additionally, the quality of match rates is lower in rural areas than in urban areas, as there are more rural roads and PO boxes.

The study employed geocoding locators that better capture the location of residences. The accuracy of gold-standard locations is also higher compared to geocoding results from unreliable geocodes. Gold-standard GPS coordinates are not available for all AHS participants. However, the large sample size of reference coordinates allowed the study to examine accuracy by rurality, match status, and state. However, direct comparisons between states were not possible due to the different geocode years.

In a study comparing two methods of automatic geocoding, the accuracy of method A was higher than that of method B. The accuracy of method A was better than that of method B and R. However, the accuracy of method B was lower than that of method R. Using a Chi-Square test, the accuracy level was compared between urban and rural areas. In both cases, the accuracy was greater in the urban areas compared to rural ones.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mailing Checks Safely

What is a Geocoding API?

Address Verification API