Fast Record Linkage for Company Entities

Record Linkage is an essential part of almost all real-world systems that consume data coming from different sources, structured and unstructured. Typically no common key is available in order to connect the records. Often massive data cleaning and data integration processes have to be completed before any data analytics and further processing can be performed. Though record linkage is often seen as a somewhat tedious necessary step, it is able to reveal valuable insights of the data at hand. These insights guide further analytic approaches over the data and support data visualization. In this work we focus on company entity matching, where company name, location and industry are taken into account. The matching is done on the fly to accommodate realtime processing of streamed data. Our contribution is a system that uses rule-based matching algorithms for scoring operations which we extend with a machine learning approach to account for short company names. We propose an end-to-end highly scalable enterprise-grade system. Linkage time is greatly reduced by efficient decomposition of the search space using MinHash. High linkage accuracy is reached by the proposed thorough scoring process of the matching candidates. Based on two real world ground truth datasets, we show that our approach reaches a recall of 91% compared to 86% for baseline approaches. These results are achieved while scaling linearly with the number of nodes used in the system.