Deduplication of Hospital Data using Genetic Programming

Abstract

The record deduplication is the task of identifying, in a data repository, records that refer to the same real world entity or object in spite of misspelling words, types, different writing styles or even different schema representations or data types. Several systems that rely on consistent data to offer high-quality services, such as digital libraries and e-commerce brokers, may be affected by the existence of duplicates, quasi replicas, or nearduplicate entries in their repositories. Because of that, there have been significant investments from private and government organizations for developing methods for removing replicas from its data repositories. This is due to the fact that clean and replica-free repositories not only allow the retrieval of higher quality information but also lead to more concise data and to potential savings in computational time and resources to process this data. Genetic Programming, new methodology has been proposed to reduce the computation time and resources to process data. Genetic programming combines several different pieces of evidence extracted from the data content to find a deduplication function that is able to identify whether two entries in a repository are replicas or not.