Tuning an entity matcher: fix the candidate search before the weights - 2
An entity matcher decides whether two listings describe the same real-world business. Once it runs, it produces a list of likely pairs, and someone notices a match it missed. The usual response is to lower the threshold or change the weights. Neither helps when the missing listing never reached the scorer. entitopia is an open-source project for this kind of matching on Elasticsearch. One of its sample projects reads the US register of motor carriers, about 2.1 million companies. It looks for carriers that a regulator shut down and that may have reopened under a new name. Another looks for duplicate listings among 5,419 Medicare hospitals. The carrier matcher runs in two stages: A candidate search fetches up to 500 listings that might be the same business as each shut-down carrier. A Python scorer compares each candidate with the shut-down carrier field by field and combines the results into one pair score. The settings that c...