Help
disaggregation — English
Data in an aggregated form (see “aggregation”), can be used to successfully make broad, general assessments of trends in phenomena such as health, poverty, vegetation type, and climate. This approach has the disadvantage of masking important local features and smoothing out spatial variations which are actually important to take note of. In this way, crucial inequalities in risk may also be overlooked. Assessments for which the latter type of inferences is important, rather need to use data that are disaggregated on a more detailed level in order to provide more focused results. The process through which this is done is referred to as spatial disaggregation or downscaling. The effect is that information that is provided on a coarse spatial scale is transformed to equivalent information on a finer scale. In this process, consistency with the original data is maintained. See “aggregation” and “interpolation”.
