The Merge/Purge Problem for Large Databases

Summary: Defines the merge/purge problem for large multi-source databases, identifying the same individuals across inconsistent records. Compares sorted-neighborhood blocking and clustering; a multi-pass transitive closure over alternate keys improves accuracy at the cost of efficiency. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2856
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1995
Pagerank: 0.00040116748
Overall Rank: 58 | 99.61%
DOI: 10.1145/223784.223807

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Mauricio A. Hernández (Columbia University)
2. Salvatore J. Stolfo (Columbia University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{hernandez_sigmod95,
        title = {{The Merge/Purge Problem for Large Databases}},
        author = {Hernández, Mauricio A. and Stolfo, Salvatore J.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '95},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/223784.223807},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/223784.223807},
        year = {1995}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 56 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,883	On Concise Set of Relative Candidate Keys	2014	VLDB	5.2033964e-05
10,065	On Saving Outliers for Better Clustering over Noisy Data	2021	SIGMOD	5.1648805e-05
10,203	BEACON: Budget-Aware Entity Matching Across Domains	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,388	Matching Roles from Temporal Data	2023	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,619	XClean in Action: A Demonstration of Declarative XML Data Cleaning	2007	CIDR	5.093636e-05
12,817	Systematic Development of Data Mining-Based Data Quality Tools	2003	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
210	An Evaluation of Non-Equijoin Algorithms	1991	VLDB	0.00024797689
215	AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort	1994	SIGMOD	0.00024507963

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