An Introduction to Entity Resolution

(PDHP Record Linkage Workshop Series Part 1 – July 10th, 2019)

Part 1 of a multi-part workshop series on record linkage

July 10th, 2019

The PDHP workshop series resumes July 10th with the first in a multi-part series of workshops on record linkage topics & techniques within social research. Please join Assistant Professor Rebecca C. Steorts, PhD, of Duke University’s Department of Statistical Science, as she presents An Introduction to Entity Resolution, a half-day workshop geared toward population researchers, computational social scientists, statisticians, and data scientists of all experience levels. This hands-on workshop will cover both the theory and practice of probabilistic entity resolution, while demonstrating state-of-the-art techniques using R software and Apache Spark.

Topics include:

• Overview and introduction to entity resolution
• Entity resolution fundamentals (record linkage, de-duplication, blocking, and computational gains)
• Entity resolution evaluation metrics (including precision, reduction ratio, and robustness to tuning parameters)
• Bayesian entity resolution models (including both parametric and nonparametric Bayesian mixture models)
• Hands-on demonstration of state-of-the-art R packages (using blink) and computational gains (using Apache Spark)

## install packages
install.packages(c("devtools", "RecordLinkage", "blink", "knitr", "ggplot2",
                   "igraph", "textreuse", "tokenizers", "numbers"))

## install data package
devtools::install_git("https://github.com/resteorts/RLdata")