BACKGROUND

The disclosure relates generally to entity matching in data management. The disclosure relates particularly to defining weights for candidate entity attributes for their selection as indexing fields.

Master data management systems routinely match and link incoming data entities with existing data records held by the data management system. Matching records for a pair of data sets each having n records and lacking indices, can require up to n2comparisons. Indexing records into buckets using fields or attributes can reduce the number of comparisons necessary to match and link incoming and existing records to a single entity.

A data management system may define a portion of the fields of a record as an index. The corresponding attribute values in an incoming record can be hashed to create a normalized bucket value to use for comparisons to the bucket hash values of existing candidate records. Attribute values can be hashed individually or as a group of values. The hashes of the incoming record can be used by the system to identify existing records having similar or identical hash values as candidates for matching and linking to the incoming record. Data from the selected candidate records is compared to corresponding portions of the incoming record. Candidates scoring above a designated threshold in the comparison are considered matches to the incoming record.

SUMMARY

Aspects of the invention disclose methods, systems and computer readable media associated with indexing and matching entity records in a data management system by defining entity indexing attributes associated with system records, receiving an incoming data entity, selecting a set of entity candidates according to the entity indexing attributes, matching the incoming entity to an entity candidate, generating an analysis of the entity candidate selection according to entity attribute effectiveness, and revising the entity indexing attributes according to the analysis.

