Patent Document ID: 8949158
Application ID: 13281383
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A record linkage method comprising: (a) acquiring data with a computer processing arrangement executing program instructions and connected to an electronic network; (b) blocking, with the computer processing arrangement, the acquired data to find and block similar data into a blocked database; (c) applying, with the computer processing arrangement, a feature set with a machine learning model based at least in part on cost-sensitive alternating decision trees to selectively link the blocked acquired data in the blocked database; (d) storing the selectively-linked data in computer memory; and (e) enabling users to access and search said selectively-linked data via said electronic network, wherein the computer processing arrangement trains the cost-sensitive alternating decision trees from a plurality of training examples in a training database; assigns, prior to the training, the plurality of training examples with a plurality of non-uniformly distributed cost factors for the training to quantify the cost of misclassifying, and updates a weight distribution in a biased manner towards training examples with higher costs.