Estimating undercounting of vehicle-related injury cases in New Zealand: a probabilistic data integration and capture-recapture approach

Using probabilistic data linkage, an integrated database of injuries is obtained by linking on some subset of various key variables or their derivatives: names (given names, surnames and alternative names), age, sex, birthdate, phone numbers, injury date, unique identification numbers, diagnosis. To assess the quality of the links produced, false positive rates and false negative rates are computed. These rates however do not give an indication of whether the databases used for linking have undercounted injuries (bias). It is of interest to an injury researcher moreover, to have some idea of the error margin for the figures generated from integrating various injury databases, similar to what one would get in a survey for instance.