A practical approach for incorporating dependence among fields in probabilistic record linkage.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Methods for linking real-world healthcare data often use a latent class model, where the latent, or unknown, class is the true match status of candidate record-pairs. This commonly used model assumes that agreement patterns among multiple fields within a latent class are independent. When this assumption is violated, various approaches, including the most commonly proposed loglinear models, have been suggested to account for conditional dependence.

Methods

We present a step-by-step guide to identify important dependencies between fields through a correlation residual plot and demonstrate how they can be incorporated into loglinear models for record linkage. This method is applied to healthcare data from the patient registry for a large county health department.

SUBMITTER: Daggy JK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3766252 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature