st: Re: Question about match merge

["Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>]

...
This was the topic of my talk at NASUG last month.  I have not yet submitted my 
presentation and the reclink.ado file, but they are forthcoming.  reclink.ado 
does a fairly basic probabilistic record linkage, which is what you describe. 
The current version allows for matching and non-matching weights for each 
variable and does fuzzy string matching (using a bigram), but does not provide 
for observation-specific weighting.  I have been considering approaches for 
adding that feature.  The ado should be available within the next week or two.

Michael Blasnik

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Talkington" <talkings@gmu.edu>
To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 02, 2007 9:39 AM
Subject: st: Question about match merge



> I seem to recall that there's an algorithm that is able to crosswalk
> databases by matching names combined with other secondary keys, such as
> zip code, and that the algorithm will produce a "probability of match"
> for the given ID.  I used to conduct match merges based on name and zip
> in an earlier version of Stata, but it was quite cumbersome to deal with
> misspellings, typos (common transpositions of letters or numbers, etc.),
> all caps vs lower case, prefixes and suffixes, titles, middle initial
> versus middle name, etc, etc..  What I'd like to know is whether a more
> sophisticated match/merge based on primary and secondary keys or IDs has
> been developed, and if so some documentation on how it works.  Also,
> would it deal with very common names, such as "David Jones" vs less
> common names, like "Horace Vilochkek" or size of the database,  adjust
> the probability of match accordingly.  Or is all of this just some pipe
> dream I happend to think up when I was under the influence?
>
> I'll also try to scrounge up something on the FAQ database, but most of
> my text documentation on Stata 9.2 is stored in boxes since I'm in the
> midst of a move, and I need at least some idea of the capability of such
> a match/merge within the week.
>
> Scott Talkington, PhD
> talkings@gmu.edu
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