Primitive operator for similarity joins in data cleaning

Abstract

A set similarity join system and method are provided. The system can be employed to facilitate data cleaning based on similarities through the identification of 'close' tuples (e.g., records and/or rows). 'Closeness' can be is evaluated using a similarity function(s) chosen to suit the domain and/or application. Thus, the system facilitates generic domain-independent data cleansing. The system can be employed with a foundational primitive, the set similarity join (SSJoin) operator, which can be used as a building block to implement a broad variety of notions of similarity (e.g., edit similarity, Jaccard similarity, generalized edit similarity, hamming distance, soundex, etc.) as well as similarity based on co-occurrences. The SSJoin operator can exploit the observation that set overlap can be used effectively to support a variety of similarity functions. The SSJoin operator compares values based on “sets” associated with (or explicitly constructed for) each one of them.