The Intuition Behind the Use of Expectation Maximisation to Train Record Linkage Models

How unsupervised learning is used to estimate model parameters in Splink

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

Splink is a free probabilistic record linkage library that predicts the likelihood that two records refer to the same entity. For example, what is the probability that the following two records match?

Example pairwise record comparison

The underlying statistical model is called the Fellegi Sunter model. It works by computing partial match weights, which are a measure of the importance of the …

data science entity-resolution fuzzy-matching intuition