Exploring a New Metric for Accurately Measuring Blocking Precision in Entity Resolution Tasks

• Dimas Cassimiro Nascimento Federal University of Agreste of Pernambuco http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3195-6481
• Vítor Alan Bezerra Silva Federal University of Agreste of Pernambuco

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbbd.2025.246994

Abstract

Entity resolution is a crucial task in data integration, aiming to identify records that refer to the same real-world entity. Blocking techniques are widely used to improve efficiency by reducing the number of record comparisons. However, traditional metrics, such as Pair Quality (PQ), fail to account for redundant comparisons, potentially distorting the assessment of blocking effectiveness. This paper introduces the PQ∗ metric, designed to provide a more accurate precision measure by eliminating the impact of redundant comparisons. We also propose the PQ∗C and P̂Q∗E algorithms, which efficiently calculate and estimate PQ∗, respectively. Experimental results show that, for all evaluated datasets, PQ and PQ∗ yield different results in every scenario where more than one blocking key is used. Furthermore, the difference between the two metrics increases as more blocking keys are employed for indexing.

Keywords: Entity Resolution, Blocking, Indexing, Blocking Precision

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