Probabilistic data linkage to study the epidemiology of unintentional fatal drowning in a large metropolitan region.

ABSTRACT:

Background

It is difficult to study the epidemiology of drowning at the regional level because of multiple data sources, many of which have a high degree of unstandardized and missing data. We aimed to link multiple datasets to identify demographics and geographic locations of unintentional fatal drowning in a metropolitan region and compare linked data with vital statistic data.

Methods

This cross-sectional study included unintentional drowning fatalities among persons of all ages in metropolitan Houston between 2016 and 2022. Probabilistic linking was used to link multiple datasets and geographical mapping to identify drowning locations. The effectiveness of data linkage was assessed by the recall, precision, and F1-score (harmonic mean of precision and recall). Geographic

SUBMITTER: Shenoi RP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12522868 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature