Robust record linkage blocking using suffix arrays

Record linkage is an important data integration task that has many practical uses for matching, merging and duplicate removal in large and diverse databases. However, a quadratic scalability for the brute force approach necessitates the design of appropriate indexing or blocking techniques. We design and evaluate an efficient and highly scalable blocking approach based on suffix arrays. Our suffix grouping technique exploits the ordering used by the index to merge similar blocks at marginal extra cost, resulting in a much higher accuracy while retaining the high scalability of the base suffix array method. Efficiently grouping similar suffixes is carried out with the use of a sliding window technique. We carry out an in-depth analysis of our method and show results from experiments using real and synthetic data, which highlights the importance of using efficient indexing and blocking in real world applications where data sets contain millions of records.