reclin2reclin2 is a package for record linkage an
deduplication. The package is an update to the reclin
package. As the package is not backwards compatible with
reclin and reclin still has some features that
are not present in reclin2 it was decided to release the
package under a new name.
The focus of reclin2 is on performance, memory and CPU
and flexibility. To get the performance reclin2 uses
data.table for most of its computations and
reclin2 has the ability to spread its computations over
multiple CPU cores or machines. In principle record linkage can easily
be sped up using parallelization and by using multiple machines using
the snow package data can be distributed over multiple
machines thereby making use of the memory available on those
machines.
Each record linkage project often has its own idiosyncrasies.
Therefore, it is important that users are able to customise parts of the
linkage process. reclin2 is designed as a kind of toolkit
for record linkage. It has functions and methods for different parts of
the linkage process. Users are able to mix these different functions to
get a custom record linkage process. Furthermore, reclin2
uses relatively simple data structures. The core data structure is a
data.table with pairs and the properties of these pairs.
Therefore, users can relatively easy manipulate this data and write
custom functions that manipulate this data.
Many of the features can be found in the vignettes of the package: