Adaptive blocking techniques can improve computation time for record linkage by maximizing true matches identified while limiting false positives. Approaches like disjunctive and disjunctive normal form blocking select record pair matches covered by at least one or conjunction of blocking predicates, applying techniques like red-blue set cover to iteratively select predicates that improve the true to false ratio. Evaluation of these adaptive blocking methods on real-world datasets demonstrated increased accuracy and reduction ratios for record linkage tasks.

1. Adaptive Blocking -key points
• Reduce computation time
• Apply across domains
• Maximize recall
• Limit false positives
• Disjunctive / DNF blocking
• Approx.Red-Blue Set Cover
• Increased reduction ratio
• Increased recall
Bilenko,Kamath,Mooney.“Adaptive Blocking: Learning to Scale Up Record Linkage.”Proceedings of the 6th
IEEE International Conference on Data Mining.Hong Kong,December 2006

2. Blocking Predicates
• Index function: generates keys based field values (e.g.first three letters
of name)
• Equality function: returns True if any set of index keys matches for a
given set of record pairs
• Covered pairs: matched (equal) records for a given predicate
• Blocking function: blocking predicate set w/aggregate index & equality

3. find optimal blocking function
that
minimizes false positives
after
finding most true positives
(within some error)

4. Disjunctive and DNF blocking
• Disjunctive: select pairs covered by at least one
blocking predicate
• Disjunctive Normal Form: select pairs covered by
at least one conjunction of blocking predicates

5. Disjunctive Red-blue set cover
DNF
Red-blue set cover

6. Disjunctive Blocking
• Remove predicates covering too many false pairs
• Remove false pairs covered by too many predicates
• Predicate cost == # of false pairs
• Weighted set cover: greedy predicate selection based
on improvement; check uncovered threshhold; repeat

7. DNF Blocking
• Remove predicates covering too many pairs
• Construct predicate conjunctions,length <= k-1
• Add conjunctions maximizing marginal true/false
ratio to set
• Apply Disjunctive Blocking with resulting predicates