← Glossary
Entity matching
also called entity resolution, record linkage
Entity matching is the task of identifying records that refer to the same real-world entity, across or within datasets, even when those records are not identical.
Entity matching answers one question. Do these two records describe the same thing? Real-world data is full of typos and missing fields, so an exact comparison fails. The same customer shows up in many forms that are not identical.
A full entity matching pipeline has two core stages: blocking to generate candidate pairs, and matching to classify them. It often adds a labeling stage to train the matcher.
The terms entity resolution and record linkage mean the same thing as entity matching, with slightly different roots in different fields.