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Fuzzy matching – Comparing records with string distance measures

In previous posts we have loosely discussed the act of comparing strings. Until now this has been a nebulous term relying primarily on intuition to understand but if we want automated systems such as PolyAnalyst to perform what we call comparison it needs to be well defined and based on calculation. This concept is typically referred to as a string metric and is a method of putting into numbers how…
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Fuzzy matching

In our daily work we often need to make comparisons of data between and within datasets. Such operations include looking for multiple copies of records for elimination or some other analysis task. Another type of operation is a “join” which is a method of combining two tables into one. For example, we may have one table that contains products and their prices while another table contains products and the current…
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Challenges in human name detection

When working with big data, it is often possible to automate the slow, mind-numbing information extraction tasks, for precisely the reason that they require little creative energy. One such automatable process is detecting, extracting, and resolving human names from text data. For example, an insurance company may want to automatically extract from call center notes the names of all parties involved in an accident. However, they process hundreds of thousands…
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Improving how mixed sources of data are accurately merged together through the use of fuzzy joins

In our daily work we often need to combine two or more datasets together into one. This type of operation, known as a join, is rather simple when each record contains a unique ID present in both datasets. However, there are many scenarios where datasets use different methods of creating unique keys and thus do not match or do not have unique keys at all. In these situations the traditional…
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