Analysis of Historical Census Household data with Similarity Threshold Method

Historical census data contains valuable information of families in a country. It captures information about ancestors. These data can be used to reconstruct important parts of a specific period in order to trace the households and families changes across time. Linking census data is a challenging task due to poor data quality, household changes over time. During the decades, a household may split multiple households due to marriage or moving to another household. This paper introduces an approach for data cleaning, standardization and linking of historical census data across time. The key fact of the proposed approach is firstly to detect households, clean and unified into standard format. After cleaning these records, approximate string similarity measures are used to link individual records and then define matched and unmatched records with similarity threshold method. The result of the experiment shows optimal threshold value which is efficient for household linkage