Jonas Helgertz
Vice Dean Research, Associate Professor
A new strategy for linking U.S. historical censuses : A case study for the IPUMS multigenerational longitudinal panel
Author
Summary, in English
This paper presents a probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to many sources of digitized historical records. The method links records using a two-step approach, first establishing high confidence matches among men by exploiting a comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics. The method then proceeds to link both men and women by leveraging links between households established in the first step. While only the first stage links can be directly comparable to other popular methods in research on the U.S., our method yields both considerably higher linkage rates and greater accuracy while only performing negligibly worse than other algorithms in resembling the target population.
Department/s
- Department of Economic History
- Centre for Economic Demography
Publishing year
2022
Language
English
Pages
12-29
Publication/Series
Historical Methods
Volume
55
Issue
1
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Heldref Publications
Topic
- History and Archaeology
Keywords
- census data
- machine learning
- Record linkage
- United States of America
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0161-5440