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Join Records Using Linkage Results

Source: R/join_records.R
join_records.Rd

Joins two datasets using row-index pairs returned by record linkage.

Usage

join_records(
  links,
  A,
  B,
  all = FALSE,
  all_A = all,
  all_B = all,
  suffixes = c(".a", ".b"),
  keep_from_links = FALSE
)

Arguments

A linkage result from mec(), predict.rec_lin_model(), mec_blocking(), or a data.frame/data.table with columns a and b.

A

A data.frame or data.table.

B

A data.frame or data.table.

all

Logical indicating whether to include unmatched records from both datasets.

all_A

Logical indicating whether to include unmatched records from A.

all_B

Logical indicating whether to include unmatched records from B.

suffixes

A character vector of length two used to distinguish columns from A and B when their names conflict with each other or with linkage columns.

Logical or character vector. If FALSE, only columns a and b are kept from the linkage table. If TRUE, all non-index linkage columns are kept. If a character vector, only the selected non-index linkage columns are kept.

Value

Returns a data.table containing:

  • a – row indices of records from A,

  • b – row indices of records from B,

  • columns selected from links – linkage metadata kept according to keep_from_links, if requested,

  • columns from A – values of records from A, with suffixes[1] added when needed,

  • columns from B – values of records from B, with suffixes[2] added when needed.

Note

The function follows the general design of link(), adjusted to linkage results used in automatedRecLin.

Author

Adam Struzik

Examples

A <- data.frame(name = c("James", "Emma"), age = c(30, 28))
B <- data.frame(name = c("James", "Emily"), city = c("Boston", "Denver"))
links <- data.frame(a = 1, b = 1, ratio = 10)
join_records(links, A, B)
#>        a     b name.a   age name.b   city
#>    <int> <int> <char> <num> <char> <char>
#> 1:     1     1  James    30  James Boston