Online Program Home
My Program

Abstract Details

Activity Number: 116 - Modern Advances in Record Linkage Using Statistical Learning Methods
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2018 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science
Abstract #330491
Title: UNIQUE ENTITY ESTIMATION with APPLICATION to the SYRIAN CONFLICT
Author(s): Beidi Chen*
Companies: Rice University
Keywords: clustering; entity resolution; {dimension reduction
Abstract:

Entity resolution identifies and removes duplicate entities in large, noisy databases and has grown in both usage and new developments as a result of increased data availability. Nevertheless, entity resolution has tradeoffs regarding assumptions of the data generation process, error rates, and computational scalability that make it a difficult task for real applications. In this paper, we focus on a related problem of unique entity estimation, which is the task of estimating the unique number of entities and associated standard errors in a data set with duplicate entities. Unique entity estimation shares many fundamental challenges of entity resolution, namely, that the computational cost of all-to-all entity comparisons is intractable for large databases. To circumvent this computational barrier, we propose an efficient (near-linear time) estimation algorithm based on locality sensitive hashing. Our estimator, under realistic assumptions, is unbiased and has provably low variance compared to existing random sampling based approaches. In addition, we empirically show its superiority over the state-of-the-art estimators on three real applications.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

Back to the full JSM 2018 program