Grannis SJ, Overhage JM, Hui S, McDonald CJ. Analysis of a Probabilistic Record Linkage Technique
without Human Review. Proc AMIA Symp. 2003;:259-63.
We previously developed a deterministic record linkage algorithm demonstrating sensitivities approaching 90% while
maintaining 100% specificity. Substantially better performance has been reported using probabilistic linkage techniques;
however, such methods often incorporate human review into the process. To avoid human review, we employed an estimator
function using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to establish a single true-link threshold. We compared the
unsupervised probabilistic results against the manually reviewed gold-standard for two hospital registries, as well
against our previous deterministic results. At an estimated specificity of 99.95%, actual specificities were 99.43%
and 99.42% for registries A and B, respectively. At an estimated sensitivity of 99.95%, actual sensitivities were 99.19%
and 98.99% for registries A and B, respectively. The EM algorithm estimated linkage parameters with acceptable accuracy,
and was an improvement over the deterministic algorithm. Such a methodology may be used where record linkage is required,
but human intervention is not possible or practical.
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