Title: In Search of an Entity Resolution OASIS: Optimal Asymptotic Sequential Importance Sampling,
Abstract: Entity resolution (ER) presents unique challenges for evaluation methodology.
While crowdsourcing platforms acquire ground truth, sound approaches to
sampling must drive labelling efforts. In ER, extreme class imbalance between
matching and non-matching records can lead to enormous labelling requirements
when seeking statistically consistent estimates for rigorous evaluation. This
paper addresses this important challenge with the OASIS algorithm: a sampler
and F-measure estimator for ER evaluation. OASIS draws samples from a (biased)
instrumental distribution, chosen to ensure estimators with optimal asymptotic
variance. As new labels are collected OASIS updates this instrumental
distribution via a Bayesian latent variable model of the annotator oracle, to
quickly focus on unlabelled items providing more information. We prove that
resulting estimates of F-measure, precision, recall converge to the true
population values. Thorough comparisons of sampling methods on a variety of ER
datasets demonstrate significant labelling reductions of up to 83% without loss
to estimate accuracy.