Record Linkage Toolkit.
reclin2
reclin2
is a package for record linkage an deduplication. The package is an update to the reclin
package. As the package is not backwards compatible with reclin
and reclin
still has some features that are not present in reclin2
it was decided to release the package under a new name.
The focus of reclin2
is on performance, memory and CPU and flexibility. To get the performance reclin2
uses data.table
for most of its computations and reclin2
has the ability to spread its computations over multiple CPU cores or machines. In principle record linkage can easily be sped up using parallelization and by using multiple machines using the snow
package data can be distributed over multiple machines thereby making use of the memory available on those machines.
Each record linkage project often has its own idiosyncrasies. Therefore, it is important that users are able to customise parts of the linkage process. reclin2
is designed as a kind of toolkit for record linkage. It has functions and methods for different parts of the linkage process. Users are able to mix these different functions to get a custom record linkage process. Furthermore, reclin2
uses relatively simple data structures. The core data structure is a data.table
with pairs and the properties of these pairs. Therefore, users can relatively easy manipulate this data and write custom functions that manipulate this data.
Many of the features can be found in the vignettes of the package: