A strategy for allowing meaningful and comparable scores in approximate matching
Carina F. Dorneles, Carlos Alberto Heuser, Viviane P. Moreira, Altigran S. da Silva, Edleno Silva de Moura · 2007
The goal of approximate data matching is to assess whether two distinct data instances represent the same real world object. This is usually achieved through the use of a similarity function, which returns a score that defines how similar two data instances are. If this score surpasses a given threshold, both data instances are considered as representing the same real world object. The score values returned by a similarity function depend on the algorithm that implements the function and have no meaning to the user (apart from the fact that a higher similarity value means that two data instances are more similar). In this paper, we propose that instead of defining the threshold in terms of the scores returned by a similarity function, the user specifies the precision that is expected from the matching process. Precision is a well known quality measure and has a clear interpretation from the user's point of view. Our approach relies on mapping between similarity scores and precision values based on a training data set. Experimental results show the training may be executed against a representative data set, and reused for other databases from the same domain.