A Multi-layer Naïve Bayes Model for Approximate Identity Matching

Abstract

Identity management is critical to various governmental practices ranging from providing citizens services to enforcing homeland security. The task of searching for a specific identity is difficult because multiple identity representations may exist due to issues related to unintentional errors and intentional deception. We propose a Naïve Bayes identity matching model that improves existing techniques in terms of effectiveness. Experiments show that our proposed model performs significantly better than the exact-match based technique and achieves higher precision than the record comparison technique. In addition, our model greatly reduces the efforts of manually labeling training instances by employing a semi-supervised learning approach. This training method outperforms both fully supervised and unsupervised learning. With a training dataset that only contains 30% labeled instances, our model achieves a performance comparable to that of a fully supervised learning.