We study the problem of group linkage: linking records that refer to entities in the same group. Applications for group linkage include finding businesses in the same chain, finding conference attendees from the same affiliation, finding players from the same team, etc. Group linkage faces challenges not present for traditional record linkage. First, although different members in the same group can share some similar global values of an attribute, they represent different entities so can also have distinct local values for the same or different attributes, requiring a high tolerance for value diversity. Second, groups can be huge (with tens of thousands of records), requiring high scalability even after using good blocking strategies. We present a two-stage algorithm: the first stage identifies cores containing records that are very likely to belong to the same group, while being robust to possible erroneous values; the second stage collects strong evidence from the cores and leverages it for merging more records into the same group, while being tolerant to differences in local values of an attribute. Experimental results show the high effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm on various real-world data sets.
For record clustering in linkage, existing work may apply the transitive rule @cite_31 , or do match-and-merge @cite_3 , or reduce it to an optimization problem @cite_15 . Our work is different in that our core-identification algorithm aims at being robust to a few erroneous records; and our clustering algorithm emphasizes leveraging the strong evidence collected from the cores.
@cite_31 @cite_3 @cite_15
2102350406 1797876566 2128859735 2017562693
The problem of record linkage focuses on determining whether two object descriptions refer to the same underlying entity. Addressing this problem effectively has many practical applications, e.g., elimination of duplicate records in databases and citation matching for scholarly articles. In this paper, we consider a new domain where the record linkage problem is manifested: Internet comparison shopping. We address the resulting linkage setting that requires learning a similarity function between record pairs from streaming data. The learned similarity function is subsequently used in clustering to determine which records are co-referent and should be linked. We present an online machine learning method for addressing this problem, where a composite similarity function based on a linear combination of basis functions is learned incrementally. We illustrate the efficacy of this approach on several real-world datasets from an Internet comparison shopping site, and show that our method is able to effectively learn various distance functions for product data with differing characteristics. We also provide experimental results that show the importance of considering multiple performance measures in record linkage evaluation. Tasks such as record linkage and multi-target tracking, which involve reconstructing the set of objects that underlie some observed data, are particularly challenging for probabilistic inference. Recent work has achieved efficient and accurate inference on such problems using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques with customized proposal distributions. Currently, implementing such a system requires coding MCMC state representations and acceptance probability calculations that are specific to a particular application. An alternative approach, which we pursue in this paper, is to use a general-purpose probabilistic modeling language (such as BLOG) and a generic Metropolis-Hastings MCMC algorithm that supports user-supplied proposal distributions. Our algorithm gains flexibility by using MCMC states that are only partial descriptions of possible worlds; we provide conditions under which MCMC over partial worlds yields correct answers to queries. We also show how to use a context-specific Bayes net to identify the factors in the acceptance probability that need to be computed for a given proposed move. Experimental results on a citation matching task show that our general-purpose MCMC engine compares favorably with an application-specific system. We present a new method for clustering based on compression. The method does not use subject-specific features or background knowledge, and works as follows: First, we determine a parameter-free, universal, similarity distance, the normalized compression distance or NCD, computed from the lengths of compressed data files (singly and in pairwise concatenation). Second, we apply a hierarchical clustering method. The NCD is not restricted to a specific application area, and works across application area boundaries. A theoretical precursor, the normalized information distance, co-developed by one of the authors, is provably optimal. However, the optimality comes at the price of using the noncomputable notion of Kolmogorov complexity. We propose axioms to capture the real-world setting, and show that the NCD approximates optimality. To extract a hierarchy of clusters from the distance matrix, we determine a dendrogram (ternary tree) by a new quartet method and a fast heuristic to implement it. The method is implemented and available as public software, and is robust under choice of different compressors. To substantiate our claims of universality and robustness, we report evidence of successful application in areas as diverse as genomics, virology, languages, literature, music, handwritten digits, astronomy, and combinations of objects from completely different domains, using statistical, dictionary, and block sorting compressors. In genomics, we presented new evidence for major questions in Mammalian evolution, based on whole-mitochondrial genomic analysis: the Eutherian orders and the Marsupionta hypothesis against the Theria hypothesis. In the past several years studies have started to appear comparing the accuracies of various science mapping approaches. These studies primarily compare the cluster solutions resulting from different similarity approaches, and give varying results. In this study we compare the accuracies of cluster solutions of a large corpus of 2,153,769 recent articles from the biomedical literature (2004–2008) using four similarity approaches: co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, direct citation, and a bibliographic coupling-based citation-text hybrid approach. Each of the four approaches can be considered a way to represent the research front in biomedicine, and each is able to successfully cluster over 92p of the corpus. Accuracies are compared using two metrics—within-cluster textual coherence as defined by the Jensen-Shannon divergence, and a concentration measure based on the grant-to-article linkages indexed in MEDLINE. Of the three pure citation-based approaches, bibliographic coupling slightly outperforms co-citation analysis using both accuracy measures; direct citation is the least accurate mapping approach by far. The hybrid approach improves upon the bibliographic coupling results in all respects. We consider the results of this study to be robust given the very large size of the corpus, and the specificity of the accuracy measures used. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.