Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: st: RE: RE: 'Fuzzy' text match
From
Robert Davidson <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Re: st: RE: RE: 'Fuzzy' text match
Date
Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:19:07 -0400
Joe,
Thank you for the response. In the vast majority of cases the
complete name of variable-file 1 will be in the name of variable-file
2. The cases where it won't will be when one file has 'ABC
corporation' and the other has 'ABC corp' and I can write code to deal
with the 7 or 8 common ways those things will arise. In the interim,
I will look into the options you have suggested.
On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 5:36 PM, Joe Canner <[email protected]> wrote:
> P.S. If you haven't already, check out -reclink-, -vmatch-, and -nearmrg-, all available from SSC. I don't know how they handle this problem, but they might be worth a look.
> ________________________________________
> From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Joe Canner [[email protected]]
> Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2014 5:30 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: st: RE: 'Fuzzy' text match
>
> Robert,
>
> Do all comparisons between the two data sets follow the same pattern, e.g., the name in one file is exactly contained within the name in the other file? If so, you can use the -strpos()- function. This will still be challenging to do as a -merge-, but if you come back with a positive answer to the above question, I (or someone else here) can suggest some code that might work in this situation. It would probably involve using the shorter file as a look-up table for the longer file.
>
> Regards,
> Joe Canner
> Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
> ________________________________________
> From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Robert Davidson [[email protected]]
> Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2014 5:15 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: st: 'Fuzzy' text match
>
> Dear Statalist,
>
> I am trying to do a text match across two files in Stata 13 in which
> the names I want to match will not be the same in the two files. I
> have looked into options here and tried a few, including strgroup, but
> these do not work for the following reason: in one file I have company
> name e.g. Ford Motor Company, and in the other file I have facility
> name e.g. Warren Engine Plant Ford Motor Company. strgroup does not
> consider these two strings as even remotely close (Levenshtein
> distance is 22 here) and treats words that have nothing in common as
> being much closer. Is there a way to measure how much of one string
> appears in another so that cases like the above example might be
> considered reasonably close? To use strgroup with a threshold that
> would include a match like above, I will wind up with about 98% false
> matches. Also, my two datasets are about 1,000 observations and
> 1,000,000 observations so doing something manually is quite
> cumbersome.
>
> Thank you,
> Robert Davidson
> *
> * For searches and help try:
> * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>
> *
> * For searches and help try:
> * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>
> *
> * For searches and help try:
> * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/