Application of exact ODDS for partial agreements of names in record linkage.

Automated methods for linking records pertaining to the same individuals have in the past made only crude use of the name information. A perceptive filing clerk is more sophisticated because humans retain a lifetime memory of instances in which variant forms of names were employed interchangeably, and of synonyms that sometimes did not even resemble one another. This limitation of the machine can be rectified, but the body of knowledge required to serve as its memory must be large. The needed data have now been brought together on a suitable scale, from many past searches of Canada's Mortality Data Base. Described here are the development and use of the resulting tables of essentially exact discriminating powers (or ODDS) to do with comparisons of male given names. The aim is to reduce the proportion of ambiguously linked pairs of records requiring labor intensive clerical resolution. The tables are intended for general use in this country, and as a model for similar facilities appropriate to other populations.