ArticleBiometrika2018
Theoretical limits of microclustering for record linkage.
Article in Biometrika, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- False Discovery Estimation in Record Linkage.Statistics in medicine · 2025Article
- (Almost) all of entity resolution.Science advances · 2022Review
- Wartime health shocks and the postwar socioeconomic status and mortality of union army veterans and their children.Journal of health economics · 2020Article
- Clustering gene expression time series data using an infinite Gaussian process mixture model.PLoS computational biology · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There has been substantial recent interest in record linkage, where one attempts to group the records pertaining to the same entities from one or more large databases that lack unique identifiers. This can be viewed as a type of microclustering, with few observations per cluster and a very large number of clusters. We show that the problem is fundamentally hard from a theoretical perspective and, even in idealized cases, accurate entity resolution is effectively impossible unless the number of entities is small relative to the number of records and/or the separation between records from different entities is extremely large. These results suggest conservatism in interpretation of the results of record linkage, support collection of additional data to more accurately disambiguate the entities, and motivate a focus on coarser inference. For example, results from a simulation study suggest that sometimes one may obtain accurate results for population size estimation even when fine-scale entity resolution is inaccurate.
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