5-Minute Guide to Entity Resolution
Discover the essential role of entity resolution in data science including how it helps to overcome the challenges of delivering meaningful insights and optimizes decision-making.
Tackling data challenges for valuable insights
- Unify disparate datasets into a single logical entity that forms the foundation for valuable information
- Address challenges related to data quality, scale, and evolving business contexts
- Employ key principles to achieve efficient and accurate results in entity resolution
- Leverage machine learning techniques to enhance accuracy, automate processes, and save resources
Tackling data challenges for valuable insights
- Unify disparate datasets into a single logical entity that forms the foundation for valuable information
- Address challenges related to data quality, scale, and evolving business contexts
- Employ key principles to achieve efficient and accurate results in entity resolution
- Leverage machine learning techniques to enhance accuracy, automate processes, and save resources
Enhance data quality and enable strategic decision-making with entity resolution
Business decisions usually center on certain logical entities, such as customers, suppliers, products, etc. For example, when you are researching companies for potential investments, a holistic view of the target company with a consistent set of identifiers (from data sources such as S&P Capital IQ, or Pitchbook) and attributes (LinkedIn employee count growth) can provide context to the business data that matters most to your investment criteria. So as you are designing your data pipelines and workflows, you should define the entities so that everyone is “speaking the same language” and agrees what the data (and metadata) is and is not.
Entity resolution (ER), also known as entity linkage or record matching, is a technique used to associate multiple disparate datasets into a logical entity or, in simpler terms, one real-world thing like a person, organization, address, bank account, device, etc. Entity resolution addresses the challenge of reconciling records across (and within) datasets so that the same records are detected, matched, and assigned a unique ID to ensure they are treated as one unique entity going forward.