Introduction to Record Linkage (2026)

This in-person workshop provides a comprehensive introduction to record linkage for practitioners across diverse scientific disciplines, including medicine, the social sciences, and economics. It addresses the fundamental methodological challenges of record linkage, particularly data quality, classification error, and privacy protection. Participants will gain a practical understanding of these challenges and the conceptual foundations required to address them effectively. Special emphasis will be placed on privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL), which aims to enable accurate linkage while safeguarding sensitive personal information. The workshop concludes with a hands-on computational demonstration in R that illustrates selected approaches. These include probabilistic record linkage based on the Fellegi-Sunter model and privacy-preserving techniques employing Bloom filters.