Error Estimation in Linking Heterogeneous Data Sources

There are many instances in an institution when there is a need to gather data from different departments. Record linkage is the technique used to bring together these separately compiled records into a useful format. Unfortunately, even with perfect data, error may be introduced when records from different sources are linked. We assume then, that at least for large-scale day-to-day operations, no data collection or repository produced by linking records from different sources should be declared error free. Thus, for quality assurance purposes, it will be useful to have methods that may be applied in day-to-day operations for estimating error produced by linking records. In this paper we describe our attempts to estimate the false negative error rate in record linkage serving periodic quality reporting.