Jaro-Winkler Distance Algorithm

The Jaro-Winkler distance algorithm is a measure of the similarity between two strings. It is a variant of the Jaro similarity algorithm, which compares the two strings character by character and takes into account the number of matching characters and the number of transpositions needed to transform one string into the other. The Jaro-Winkler distance algorithm adds a prefix bonus to the Jaro similarity score, which gives additional weight to matching characters that appear at the beginning of the strings being compared. This helps the algorithm to more accurately measure the similarity between strings that may have similar but not necessarily identical prefixes. The resulting Jaro-Winkler distance ranges from 0, indicating that the two strings are completely different, to 1, indicating that the two strings are identical.

At Tilores we use the Jaro-Winkler distance algorithm as one of the potential data record matching algorithms for entity resolution. These can be combined with other matching algorithms to allow fine-tuned data matching and deduplication.