The Record Linkage Interest Group (RLIG) was instigated by Dean Resnick and Jana Asher as a forum for exchanging ideas related to this topic for practitioners and data users both among ASA members and among non-members. It was accepted as an approved ASA interest group on August 6, 2021. The Record Linkage Interest Group;s first year was 2022.
The RLIG is part of the American Statistical Association.
- Membership is open to individuals inside and outside the ASA.
Record Linkage as a field of study really got under way in the mid-1900s with the capacity to compare files on individuals and entities on computers. Today activities record linkage are widespread and are sometimes referred to as file matching, database deduplication, entity resolution, data fusion, and data integration, among other terms. Record linkage takes place and is studied in government, industry, and academe. Record linkage has deterministic, probabilistic, and hybrid forms and shares similarities with methods for statistical matching.