Abstract

This paper presents a probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to many sources of digitized historical records. The method links records using a two-step approach, first establishing high confidence matches among men by exploiting a comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics. The method then proceeds to link both men and women by leveraging links between households established in the first step. While only the first stage links can be directly comparable to other popular methods in research on the U.S., our method yields both considerably higher linkage rates and greater accuracy while only performing negligibly worse than other algorithms in resembling the target population.

摘要

本文介绍了一种记录链接的概率方法，该方法是使用美国 1900 年和 1910 年的全面人口普查开发的，但适用于许多数字化历史记录来源。该方法使用两步法链接记录，首先通过利用一整套个人和背景特征在男性之间建立高可信度匹配。然后，该方法通过利用在第一步中建立的家庭之间的联系，继续将男性和女性联系起来。虽然只有第一阶段链接可以直接与美国研究中的其他流行方法进行比较，但我们的方法产生了相当高的链接率和更高的准确性，同时在类似目标人群方面的表现仅比其他算法差得可以忽略不计。