One significant challenge to scaling entity resolution algorithms to massive datasets is understanding how performance changes after moving beyond the realm of small, manually labeled reference datasets. Unlike traditional machine learning tasks, when an entity resolution algorithm performs well on small hold-out datasets, there is no guarantee this performance holds on larger hold-out datasets. We prove simple bounding properties between the performance of a match function on a small validation set and the performance of a pairwise entity resolution algorithm on arbitrarily sized datasets. Thus, our approach enables optimization of pairwise entity resolution algorithms for large datasets, using a small set of labeled data.
Perhaps the most general framework for pairwise entity resolution was presented by @cite_1 . They outlined a theoretically disciplined approach, wherein certain properties of the match and merge function guarantee a deterministic output in the optimal number of record comparisons. We explore the use of some of these properties in the derivation of our bounds. Collectively, these properties are referred to by their acronym ICAR:
@cite_1
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In this paper, we study a hybrid human-machine approach for solving the problem of Entity Resolution (ER). The goal of ER is to identify all records in a database that refer to the same underlying entity, and are therefore duplicates of each other. Our input is a graph over all the records in a database, where each edge has a probability denoting our prior belief (based on Machine Learning models) that the pair of records represented by the given edge are duplicates. Our objective is to resolve all the duplicates by asking humans to verify the equality of a subset of edges, leveraging the transitivity of the equality relation to infer the remaining edges (e.g. a = c can be inferred given a = b and b = c). We consider the problem of designing optimal strategies for asking questions to humans that minimize the expected number of questions asked. Using our theoretical framework, we analyze several strategies, and show that a strategy, claimed as "optimal" for this problem in a recent work, can perform arbitrarily bad in theory. We propose alternate strategies with theoretical guarantees. Using both public datasets as well as the production system at Facebook, we show that our techniques are effective in practice. Entity Resolution is a core task for merging data collections. Due to its quadratic complexity, it typically scales to large volumes of data through blocking: similar entities are clustered into blocks and pair-wise comparisons are executed only between co-occurring entities, at the cost of some missed matches. There are numerous blocking methods, and the aim of this work is to offer a comprehensive empirical survey, extending the dimensions of comparison beyond what is commonly available in the literature. We consider 17 state-of-the-art blocking methods and use 6 popular real datasets to examine the robustness of their internal configurations and their relative balance between effectiveness and time efficiency. We also investigate their scalability over a corpus of 7 established synthetic datasets that range from 10,000 to 2 million entities. Consider two data providers, each maintaining records of different feature sets about common entities. They aim to learn a linear model over the whole set of features. This problem of federated learning over vertically partitioned data includes a crucial upstream issue: entity resolution, i.e. finding the correspondence between the rows of the datasets. It is well known that entity resolution, just like learning, is mistake-prone in the real world. Despite the importance of the problem, there has been no formal assessment of how errors in entity resolution impact learning. In this paper, we provide a thorough answer to this question, answering how optimal classifiers, empirical losses, margins and generalisation abilities are affected. While our answer spans a wide set of losses --- going beyond proper, convex, or classification calibrated ---, it brings simple practical arguments to upgrade entity resolution as a preprocessing step to learning. One of these suggests that entity resolution should be aimed at controlling or minimizing the number of matching errors between examples of distinct classes. In our experiments, we modify a simple token-based entity resolution algorithm so that it indeed aims at avoiding matching rows belonging to different classes, and perform experiments in the setting where entity resolution relies on noisy data, which is very relevant to real world domains. Notably, our approach covers the case where one peer have classes, or a noisy record of classes. Experiments display that using the class information during entity resolution can buy significant uplift for learning at little expense from the complexity standpoint. In this paper we describe graph-based parallel algorithms for entity resolution that improve over the map-reduce approach. We compare two approaches to parallelize a Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) accelerated,IterativeMatch-Merge (IMM) entity resolution technique: BCP, where records hashed together are compared at a single node reducer, vs an alternative mechanism (RCP) where comparison load is better distributed across processors especially in the presence of severely skewed bucket sizes. We analyze the BCP and RCP approaches analytically as well as empirically using a large synthetically generated dataset. We generalize the lessons learned from our experience and submit that the RCP approach is also applicable in many similar applications that rely on LSH or related grouping strategies to minimize pair-wise comparisons.