Abstract
Accurate and efficient record linkage is an open challenge of particular relevance to Australian Government Agencies, who recognise that so-called wicked social problems are best tackled by forming partnerships founded on large-scale data fusion. Names and addresses are the most common attributes on which data from different government agencies can be linked. In this paper, we focus on the problem of address linking. Linkage is particularly problematic when the data has significant quality issues. The most common approach for dealing with quality issues is to standardise raw data prior to linking. If a mistake is made in standardisation, however, it is usually impossible to recover from it to perform linkage correctly. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for address linking that is particularly practical for linking large disparate sets of addresses, being highly scalable, robust to data quality issues and simple to implement. It obviates the need for labour intensive and problematic address standardisation. Empirical results show that approximately \(91\%\) of the generated links created by matching two large address datasets from two government agencies, were correct. Finally, we demonstrate that the linking can be performed in under 10 min, with 10 lines of code.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Arasu, A., Ganti, V., Kaushik, R.: Efficient exact set-similarity joins. In: Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 918–929. VLDB Endowment (2006)
Cands, E.J., Romberg, J.K., Tao, T.: Stable signal recovery from incomplete and inaccurate measurements. Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 59(8), 1207–1223 (2006)
Chang, L., Wang, Z., Ma, T., Jian, L., Ma, L., Goldshuv, A., Lonergan, L., Cohen, J., Welton, C., Sherry, G., Bhandarkar, M.: HAWQ: a massively parallel processing SQL engine in Hadoop. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 1223–1234. ACM, New York (2014)
Christen, P.: Data Matching: Concepts and Techniques for Record Linkage, Entity Resolution, and Duplicate Detection. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31164-2
Christen, P., Belacic, D.: Automated probabilistic address standardisation and verification. In: Australasian Data Mining Conference (AusDM05) (2005)
Christen, P., Churches, T., Hegland, M.: Febrl – a parallel open source data linkage system. In: Dai, H., Srikant, R., Zhang, C. (eds.) PAKDD 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3056, pp. 638–647. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24775-3_75
Cohen, W.W., Ravikumar, P., Fienberg, S.E.: A comparison of string metrics for matching names and records. In: SIGKDD (2003)
Gormley, C., Tong, Z.: Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide. O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol (2015)
Guo, H., Zhu, H., Guo, Z., Zhang, X., Su, Z.: Address standardization with latent semantic association. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2009, pp. 1155–1164. ACM, New York (2009)
Halevy, A., Norvig, P., Pereira, F.: The unreasonable effectiveness of data. IEEE Intell. Syst. 24, 8–12 (2009)
Hellerstein, J.M., Ré, C., Schoppmann, F., Wang, D.Z., Fratkin, E., Gorajek, A., Ng, K.S., Welton, C., Feng, X., Li, K., Kumar, A.: The MADlib analytics library or MAD skills, the SQL. PVLDB 5(12), 1700–1711 (2012)
Kornacker, M., Behm, A., Bittorf, V., Bobrovytsky, T., Ching, C., Choi, A., Erickson, J., Grund, M., Hecht, D., Jacobs, M., Joshi, I., Kuff, L., Kumar, D., Leblang, A., Li, N., Pandis, I., Robinson, H., Rorke, D., Rus, S., Russell, J., Tsirogiannis, D., Wanderman-Milne, S., Yoder, M.: Impala: a modern, open-source SQL engine for Hadoop. In: CIDR (2015)
Monge, A., Elkan, C.: An efficient domain-independent algorithm for detecting approximately duplicate database records. In: DMKD 1997 (1997)
Zaharia, M., Chowdhury, M., Franklin, M.J., Shenker, S., Stoica, I.: Spark: cluster computing with working sets. In: Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, HotCloud 2010, p. 10. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhang, Y., Churchill, T., Ng, K.S. (2018). Exploiting Redundancy, Recurrency and Parallelism: How to Link Millions of Addresses with Ten Lines of Code in Ten Minutes. In: Boo, Y., Stirling, D., Chi, L., Liu, L., Ong, KL., Williams, G. (eds) Data Mining. AusDM 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 845. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0292-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0292-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-0291-6
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-0292-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)