The effect of data cleaning on record linkage quality

Table 1 Availability of data cleaning functionality across a sample of linkage packages

	Linkage Wiz	Febrl	BigMatch	Link king	FRIL	LINKS	ChoiceMaker	QualityStage
Reformat values	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Remove punctuation	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Remove alt. missing values	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Phonetic encoding	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Name/Address Standardisation	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Nickname lookup	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Sex imputation	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes

ISSN: 1472-6947