Handbook of Record Linkage: Methods for Health and Statistical Studies, Administration, and Business.

Abstract

Introduction. Part 1 The basics and their application: including probabilistic linkage, betting odds and frequency ratios, using global and specific discriminating powers. Part 2 Exploiting more of the discriminating power: including what to do with missing identifiers, comparing names, years of birth, places of birth, geographical identifiers and marital status, linked and unlinkable pairs, some pitfalls. Part 3 Saving central processor time: including blocking the files, the preliminary rejections, the comparison sequence and its early cut-off, the application of value-specific discriminating powers. Part 4 Organizing the product: including calculating absolute versus relative odds, setting an optimum threshold, grouping the matched pairs. Part 5 Recapitulation and further thoughts. Appendices: A - definitions. B - derivations. C - typical identifier frequencies. D - linking special disease registers. E - errors, their sources and magnitudes. F - calculating the outcome frequencies for a non-existent file of unlinkable pairs. G - constructing a file of randomly matched unlinkable pairs. H - details of phonetic coding systems for names. I - design of a computer linkage system. Bibliography. Index.