On Statistical Measures for Data Quality Evaluation
Xiaoxia Han
Abstract
Most GIS databases contain data errors. The quality of the data sources such as traditional paper maps or more recent remote sensing data determines spatial data quality. In the past several decades, different statistical measures have been developed to evaluate data quality for different types of data, such as nominal categorical data, ordinal categorical data and numerical data. Although these methods were originally proposed for medical research or psychological research, they have been widely used to evaluate spatial data quality. In this paper, we first review statistical methods for evaluating data quality, discuss under what conditions we should use them and how to interpret the results, followed by a brief discussion of statistical software and packages that can be used to compute these data quality measures.