Correcting fuzzy matches

1

Hi

I am trying to match medicine names from one supplier’s price list to another supplier’s price list for the purposes of price comparison. The medicine names are written slightly differently in both files.

I can see that we can use the fuzzy match column to find similar strings and that would certainly help a great deal in speeding up the matching process.

However, I wanted to know what I can do if I find an incorrect fuzzy match? How would you suggest handling this?

Regards,

Shaheed

2

Hi Shaheed,

there are two approaches:

  1. Have a master list of canonical names. Use fuzzy matching to replace non-canonical names for canonical ones.

  2. Have a master list of IDs with possible names. Replaces similar names with the same ID using fuzzy matching and lookup.