Health and Transportation: Small Scale Area Association

Public health, as a major factor influencing the livability and well-being of a community has 2 been a subject of interest in many academic fields. It is postulated that public health has strong 3 correlations with various factors including land development, urban form, and transportation 4 system elements. However, due to scarcity of individual level and confidential health data, such 5 analysis has been typically conducted in an aggregate level resulting in less accurate results due 6 to aggregation bias. In this paper, a methodology is developed and applied to disaggregate an 7 individual-level health data in county scale into smaller geography by using an iterative 8 proportional fitting approach while maintaining the marginal distributions of the controlled 9 variables. Then, the disaggregated data is used to estimate various models of individual health 10 condition as a function of socio-demographic, built environment, and transportation system 11 attributes. It is noteworthy that the proposed approach can be applied to disaggregate any aggregate data in an efficient way.