Re: st: merge creates duplicates in master data

[Michael Norman Mitchell <Michael.Norman.Mitchell@gmail.com>]

Dear William

  I have approached these kinds of problems in the past, but have 
approached them in a different way with quite a bit of success. Please 
take this for what it is worth, just a brainstorming idea or an idea for 
a future approach. You may see it useful in your case, maybe not.

  Consider the two datasets, A and B that have the kind of information 
that you are describing. They may match perfectly, they may match to 
varying degrees of imperfect matches. I would set up a series of match 
criteria, for example

  1. first name, last name, middle initial, region

Matches at this level would be consider a "quality 1" match. If a 
quality 1 match was not found, I would take the *unmatched observations* 
from each dataset, and submit them to a second match criteria, for example

  2. first name, last name, region

Matches at this level would be considered a "quality 2" match. If a 
quality 2 match was not found, I would take the *unmatched observations* 
(neither matched at quality 1 or quality 2) and then try a third round, 
for example

  3. first initial, last name, region

Matches at this level would be considerd a "quality 3" match. If this 
was the final match criteria, then I would consider the remaining 
unmatched to be "not found" and would manually inspect them looking for 
other ways that they could be matched. I would then append the matched 
records from "round 1", "round 2" and "round 3" and those would form the 
matched records.

  I don't know if this strategy is exactly helpful in your case. If 
not, I hope it is something that you (or other Statalisters) may find 
useful in the future. In fact, I think I will put this on my list of "to 
do" items for an upcoming Stata tidbit of the week.

Best luck and best regards,

Michael N. Mitchell
See the Stata tidbit of the week at...
http://www.MichaelNormanMitchell.com

On 2010-04-25 7.42 PM, Will Hauser wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I am experiencing unexpected behavior in Stata 10 when using the merge 
> command.
> I am matching two lists based on a series of string variables (first 
> name, last name, initials) and one numeric region identifier.  I have 
> carefully cleaned the string variables of excess spaces and 
> punctuation marks but they are inherently difficult to match as the 
> name on one list may correspond to a nick name or abbreviation on the 
> other (e.g. "WILLIAM" may correspond with "W" or "BILL").  My approach 
> to this problem is to make multiple merges between the two lists each 
> time using less information.  For example, the first merge uses first 
> name, last name, and region.  The second uses first initial, last 
> name, and region.  The third just last name and region (and so on).  
> Since the master data is inviolate subsequent mismatches should never 
> overwrite earlier 'good' matches.  I am using the update option but 
> not the replace option.  I am not using the unique option since the 
> variables do not uniquely identify the cases in either the master or 
> the using.
>
> From what I can tell Stata is duplicating cases in the master 
> dataset.  The end result is 10 pairs of duplicate entries that appear 
> identical in every way save for the _merge summary variable from the 
> last merge.  The summary variable indicates using agrees with master 
> (3) for one of the duplicates and indicates that using does not agree 
> with master for the other (5).  There are no missing values in either 
> list and I can see nothing special about the entries that are 
> duplicated.  I have used the duplicates command to verify that these 
> duplicates are not present in the master data prior to merging.
>
> I assume this is not a bug but is rather something about the merge 
> command I am misunderstanding and that concerns me very much.  I would 
> be happy to provide the lists and the relevant portion of the do file 
> if anyone is interested.  The lists are public and are not unusually 
> long (958 cases in the master and 593 cases in the using).
>
> Thanks for your insight,
>
> William Hauser
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