An End-to-End Big Data Deduplication Framework based on Online Continuous Learning

Abstract

While big data benefits are numerous, most of the collected data is of poor quality and, therefore, cannot be effectively used as it is. One of the leading big data quality challenges is data duplication. Indeed, the gathered big data are usually messy and may contain duplicated records. The process of detecting and eliminating duplicated records is known as Deduplication, or Entity Resolution or also Record Linkage. Data deduplication has been widely discussed in the literature, and multiple deduplication approaches were suggested. However, few efforts have been made to address deduplication issues in Big Data Context. Also, the existing big data deduplication approaches are not handling the case of the decreasing performance of the deduplication model during the serving. In addition, most current methods are limited to duplicate detection, which is part of the deduplication process. Therefore, we aim through this paper to propose an End-to-End Big Data Deduplication Framework based on a semi-supervised learning approach that outperforms the existing big data deduplication approaches with an F-score of 98,21%, a Precision of 98,24% and a Recall of 96,48%. Moreover, the suggested framework encompasses all data deduplication phases, including data preprocessing and preparation, automated data labeling, duplicate detection, data cleaning, and an auditing and monitoring phase. This last phase is based on an online continual learning strategy for big data deduplication that allows addressing the decreasing performance of the deduplication model during the serving. The obtained results have shown that the suggested continual learning strategy has increased the model accuracy by 1,16%. Furthermore, we apply the proposed framework to three different datasets and compare its performance against the existing deduplication models. Finally, the results are discussed, conclusions are made, and future work directions are highlighted.