Why Record Linkage needs a scalable computing power?

Though, “Record Linkage” is a popular word among statisticians, and epidemiologists - “the problem of matching/joining records from one data source to another which describe the same entity”; has a long historical attention from the time since data collection gained (1960s) and continues to gain attention as new methods of collection, formats and stacks of data being added to the existing. The other popular terms for the same are deduplication, data matching, entity/name resolution, record matching, etc. Please, refer to the following paper https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/icdm06.pdf, for one of the good works in this field. Also, one can look at the below google trends graph for the attention to this filed from 2014 to the present.

The purpose of this blog is to bring forth, why record linkage needs a scalable computing power, for which I present my observations with an simple example as show below:

 

Views expressed here are from his industry experience. He can be reached at mavuluri.pradeep@gmail or besteconometrician@gmail.com for more details.

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Python package maintenance GUI’s like R ones

It is quite often I observed people approaching me to help out in understanding whether Python has good Graphical User Interface (GUI) for package maintenance like R ones:

Base R: update.packages(ask=’graphics’)

RStudio: Tools >>> Check for Package Updates

Answer for it would be; currently few like this one “pips” are still under development, and still I am using “pip-upgrader” for the maintenance.

Read and write using fst & feather for large data files.

For past few years , I was using feather as my favorite data writing and reading option in R (one reason was its cross platform compatible across Julia, Python and R), however, recently, observed it’s read and write time lines were not at all effective with large files of size > 5 GB. And found fst format to be good for both read and write of large files in R, only disadvantage is it not cross platform compatible as feather. Especially, fst compression with 100% is good for storage of large files and it is more efficient in reading the same into R environment. Also, I feel no point in re-testing and giving benchmarks as they are already available at fst site.


                                                                     ------ Happy R programming let me know your experiences.