Reflection on Geodemographic

As far as what I understand, geodemographic data links the science of demography and geography together to represent the variation in human and physical phenomenon locationally and spatially. The study presented in this article used a geodemographic dataset call ACORN. The author mentioned in the limitation part that the uncertainties in the ACORN data are associated with the imputation of missing information. And there is also some limitation such that the uncertainties in this dataset are difficult to quantify. Since geodemographic data are very much linked with human behavior, it would be hard to identify its quality and accuracy. But I still wonder if there are some possible ways to deal with such uncertainty? Or how can we manage geodemographic data so it can have relatively less uncertainty?

Besides, the author also assumes that there is no reginal or local variation in the expenditure profiles, which means households belonging to the same type are presumed to have the same spending patterns no matter where they are located in the territory. But obviously this can be problematic, since a uncertain data source may strongly influence the final result. So, is there any way that we can assess how this averaging process can influence the result, and is there any way that we can at least tried to eliminate it?

There is also one thing that I’m very curious when I’m trying to understand the concept of geodemographic data. Are they the same with census data? If not, what is the difference? Are geocoded census data part of geodemographic data? Or are census data part of geodemographic data?

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