The Use of Names for Linking Personal Records

The skill of a human who searches large files of personal records depends much on prior knowledge of how the names vary in successive documents pertaining to the same individuals (e.g., as with ANTHONY–TONY, JOSEPH–JOE, WILLIAM–BILL). Now, an essentially exact procedure enables computers to make similar use of an accumulated memory of their own past experiences when searching for, and linking, records that relate to particular persons. This knowledge is further applied to quantify the benefits from various refinements of the rules by which the discriminating powers of names are calculated when they do not precisely agree or are substantially dissimilar. Of the six refinements tested, by far the most important is the recently developed exact approach for calculating the ODDS associated with comparisons of names that are possible synonyms.