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
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The problem of merging multiple databases of information about common entities is frequently encountered in KDD and decision support applications in large commercial and government organizations. The problem we study is often called the Merge Purge problem and is difficult to solve both in scale and accuracy. Large repositories of data typically have numerous duplicate information entries about the same entities that are difficult to cull together without an intelligent ’’equational theory‘‘ that identifies equivalent items by a complex, domain-dependent matching process. We have developed a system for accomplishing this Data Cleansing task and demonstrate its use for cleansing lists of names of potential customers in a direct marketing-type application. Our results for statistically generated data are shown to be accurate and effective when processing the data multiple times using different keys for sorting on each successive pass. Combing results of individual passes using transitive closure over the independent results, produces far more accurate results at lower cost. The system provides a rule programming module that is easy to program and quite good at finding duplicates especially in an environment with massive amounts of data. This paper details improvements in our system, and reports on the successful implementation for a real-world database that conclusively validates our results previously achieved for statistically generated data. Entity Resolution (ER) is the problem of identifying which records in a database refer to the same real-world entity. An exhaustive ER process involves computing the similarities between pairs of records, which can be very expensive for large datasets. Various blocking techniques can be used to enhance the performance of ER by dividing the records into blocks in multiple ways and only comparing records within the same block. However, most blocking techniques process blocks separately and do not exploit the results of other blocks. In this paper, we propose an iterative blocking framework where the ER results of blocks are reflected to subsequently processed blocks. Blocks are now iteratively processed until no block contains any more matching records. Compared to simple blocking, iterative blocking may achieve higher accuracy because reflecting the ER results of blocks to other blocks may generate additional record matches. Iterative blocking may also be more efficient because processing a block now saves the processing time for other blocks. We implement a scalable iterative blocking system and demonstrate that iterative blocking can be more accurate and efficient than blocking for large datasets. The presence of duplicate records is a major data quality concern in large databases. To detect duplicates, entity resolution also known as duplication detection or record linkage is used as a part of the data cleaning process to identify records that potentially refer to the same real-world entity. We present the Stringer system that provides an evaluation framework for understanding what barriers remain towards the goal of truly scalable and general purpose duplication detection algorithms. In this paper, we use Stringer to evaluate the quality of the clusters (groups of potential duplicates) obtained from several unconstrained clustering algorithms used in concert with approximate join techniques. Our work is motivated by the recent significant advancements that have made approximate join algorithms highly scalable. Our extensive evaluation reveals that some clustering algorithms that have never been considered for duplicate detection, perform extremely well in terms of both accuracy and scalability.