Importance of clean quality data plays a critical role in driving business decision and transform operation. Duplicates in the dataset will have negative impact on decision-making, reporting and efficiency. The common cause of duplicates is inconsistent data entry, merging systems, legacy data import, lack of data standards and guidelines. Duplicates increase overhead costs related to storage and transportation, while also leading to inefficient use of materials throughout their lifecycle.
The Power of Automated Deduplication
Manual deduplication has limitations such as inefficiency and risk of human error, to overcome these challenges automation is smart way. Using Automation has advantages of speed, accuracy, and scalability in large datasets. Automation can easily identify duplicates across various inconsistencies or disordered records from different locations, grouping them for efficient review and resolution.
The Process of Automated Deduplication
Automated deduplication involves multiple stages, beginning with data profiling and preprocessing using data standards. It then progresses to grouping duplicate sets through various techniques, ensuring efficient identification and resolution of duplicate records.
Data profiling
In this stage, the data undergoes a postmortem to understand the data structure, patterns, quality, and relationships both across fields and within fields. This is achieved using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, which help to uncover hidden insights, detect inconsistencies, and evaluate the semantic relationships in textual data. NLP techniques such as entity recognition, pattern recognition, and semantic analysis can identify meaningful connections, potential duplicates, and inconsistencies that might not be apparent through traditional data profiling methods.
Data Preprocessing
In this stage, the data undergoes a transformation using data standards to standardize and bring all records into same patterns. Techniques such as lemmatization and stemming are applied to reduce words to their base or root forms, ensuring consistency across the terms. Additionally, terms are replaced or mapped according to a predefined standard data dictionary, which helps maintain consistency by substituting synonyms or variations with standardized terms. Ensuring all data is aligned to a common standard, making it easier to identify duplicates and improve overall data.
Grouping Duplicates
In this stage, the data undergoes grouping and identifies of exact and probable duplicates using different approaches and techniques as listed.
- Rule Based Logic
- Fuzzy Matching using Rules.
- Machine Learning Algorithms
- Clustering Algorithms – like k-means and DBSCAN
- String Matching Techniques – Levenshtein distance or Jaro-Winkler
- Text Similarity Algorithms – Like Cosine, Jaccard and TF-IDF
Highlighting the importance of human oversight in ambiguous cases where duplicates are less clear, ensuring accuracy. Continuous monitoring and retraining machine learning models to improve deduplication performance over time.
At OptimizeMRO, we perform automated deduplication, achieving superior accuracy and completing the process 70% faster than manual methods. As a best practice, we follow combined approach that integrates automation with human oversight to ensure both efficiency and data accuracy. This hybrid strategy allows us to leverage the speed of automation while maintaining the critical quality checks provided by expert review.