Fast Bayesian Record Linkage With Record-Specific Disagreement Parameters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers are often interested in linking individuals between two datasets that lack a common unique identifier. Matching procedures often struggle to match records with common names, birthplaces, or other field values. Computational feasibility is also a challenge, particularly when linking large datasets. We develop a Bayesian method for automated probabilistic record linkage and show it recovers more than 50% more true matches, holding accuracy constant, than comparable methods in a matching of military recruitment data to the 1900 U.S. Census for which expert-labeled matches are available. Our approach, which builds on a recent state-of-the-art Bayesian method, refines the modeling of comparison data, allowing disagreement probability parameters conditional on nonmatch status to be record-specific in the smaller of the two datasets. This flexibility significantly improves matching when many records share common field values. We show that our method is computationally feasible in practice, despite the added complexity, with an R/C++ implementation that achieves a significant improvement in speed over comparable recent methods. We also suggest a lightweight method for treatment of very common names and show how to estimate true positive rate and positive predictive value when true match status is unavailable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.614 | 0.044 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".