Validation of Matching

Ya Le, Eric Bax, Nicola Barbieri, David Garcia Soriano, Jitesh Mehta, James Li

Abstract: We introduce a technique to compute probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds on precision and recall for matching algorithms. The bounds require some verified matches, but those matches may be used to develop the algorithms. The bounds can be applied to network reconciliation or entity resolution algorithms, which identify nodes in different networks or values in a data set that correspond to the same entity. For network reconciliation, the bounds do not require knowledge of the network generation process.