A tutorial on blocking methods for privacy-preserving record linkage

Abstract

In this paper, we first present five state-of-the-art private blocking methods which rely mainly on random strings, clustering, and public reference sets. We emphasize on the drawbacks of these methods, and then, we present our L-fold redundant blocking scheme, that relies on the Locality-Sensitive Hashing technique for identifying similar records. These records have undergone an anonymization transformation using a Bloom filter-based encoding technique. Finally, we perform an experimental evaluation of all these methods and present the results.