A RecordComparator
is constructed using a list of field
comparators. Once field comparison functions have been initialised,
they can be inserted into a field_comparisons
list which is
then given to a record comparator. When comparing records in a linkage
or deduplication process, each field comparator in a
field_comparisons
list will calculate a weight, and all
weights for a record pair will be stored in a weight
vector. Additional information stored with a weight vector are the
unique record identifiers for the two records in the pair
compared. The weight vectors will then be used to compute the matching
status of the record pair in the classifier as described in
Section 9.5.
The RecordComparator
is initialised using references to two
data sets to be linked (which can be the same in case of a
deduplication task), and a list of field comparison functions. An
example initialisation is given in the following section.