Abstract

The duplicate elimination problem of detecting multiple tuples, which describe the same real world entity, is an important data cleaning problem. Previous domain independent solutions to this problem relied on standard textual similarity functions (e.g., edit distance, cosine metric) between multi-attribute tuples. However, such approaches result in large numbers of false positives if we want to identify domain-specific abbreviations and conventions. In this paper, we develop an algorithm for eliminating duplicates in dimensional tables in a data warehouse, which are usually associated with hierarchies. We exploit hierarchies to develop a high quality, scalable duplicate elimination algorithm, and evaluate it on real datasets from an operational data warehouse.

Citations