Quantitative Issues in Cancer Research Working Group Seminar

Mónica Robles Fontán, PhD Student, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Leveraging Record Linkage To Enhance Public Health Research

Abstract: Record linkage is the task of combining records from different populations that belong to a single entity to create a new single population. This task allows researchers to take advantage of existing data sources to answer scientific questions that otherwise would be difficult to assess, such as studies requiring large sample sizes. There are two main approaches to performing record linkage tasks: deterministically and probabilistically, although most implementations combine both approaches. In this talk, we will explore the problem of record linkage and discuss the theoretical framework as developed by Fellegi & Sunter (1969). We will discuss practical issues that arise in the task of record linkage, as well as a real-world example in the context of observational data for COVID-19 vaccination and outcomes from Puerto Rico.