  We study the problem of group linkage: linking records that refer to entities
in the same group. Applications for group linkage include finding businesses in
the same chain, finding conference attendees from the same affiliation, finding
players from the same team, etc. Group linkage faces challenges not present for
traditional record linkage. First, although different members in the same group
can share some similar global values of an attribute, they represent different
entities so can also have distinct local values for the same or different
attributes, requiring a high tolerance for value diversity. Second, groups can
be huge (with tens of thousands of records), requiring high scalability even
after using good blocking strategies.
  We present a two-stage algorithm: the first stage identifies cores containing
records that are very likely to belong to the same group, while being robust to
possible erroneous values; the second stage collects strong evidence from the
cores and leverages it for merging more records into the same group, while
being tolerant to differences in local values of an attribute. Experimental
results show the high effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm on various
real-world data sets.
