Fienberg. A comparison of blocking methods for record linkage

Record linkage seeks to merge databases and to remove duplicates when unique identifiers are not available. Most approaches use block-ing techniques to reduce the computational complexity associated with record linkage. We review traditional blocking techniques, which typ-ically partition the records according to a set of field attributes, and consider two variants of a method known as locality sensitive hash-ing, sometimes referred to as “private blocking. ” We compare these approaches in terms of their recall, reduction ratio, and computa-tional complexity. We evaluate these methods using different synthetic datafiles and conclude with a discussion of privacy-related issues.