Privacy preserving record linkage

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We will perform research on Record Linkage algorithms for cases where the privacy of record holders must be preserved. The goal of Record Linkage is to recognize records from different databases that correspond to the same entity. With the increasing size of today's databases, the complexity and slow speed of the linking process has become one of the major challenges for performing Record Linkage. Furthermore, when databases that contain confidential information are linked across different organizations, the issue of protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the data becomes crucial. We seek to devise and evaluate methods for efficient and accurate linking of two or more databases that ensure no privacy breach occurs. Efficiency is important because the databases may be very large. In the future, Canadian companies may apply the Record Linkage algorithms created by this project to large collections of data from a diversity of clients including health, medical, and governmental organizations. The data from such organizations almost always include confidential information. Since commonly identifying data, such as names, addresses, and date of births of record holders are typically used to link records, methods for preserving the privacy of individuals are a key concern. We will also try to identify quantitative measures of trade offs between levels of privacy versus efficiency of operations.