Recently, I cam across an interesting discussion on StackOverflow¹ pertaining to approach to fuzzy matching tables in R. Good answer contributed by one of the most resilient and excellent contributors to whom I owe a lot of thanks for help suggested relying on regular expression, combining this with basic sting removal and transformations like toupper to deterministically match the tables. The solution solved the problem and was accepted.

So what’s wrong…

With this particular problem/solution pair, there is absolutely nothing wrong. On numerous occasions I have seen people running UPPER(REGEXP_REPLACE( my_value, '[[:space:]]', '' )) only so later someone can realise, that actually now they need REGEXP_REPLACE(COLUMN,'[^[:ascii:]],'') only for someone else to offer SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(COLUMN,'[^' || CHR(1) || '-' || CHR(127) || '],'')². Those are all good solutions that solve the particular challenge but they (very) seldom stand the test of time.

The real problem is in not finding the most robust approach but deciding how the challenge is being approached from a priority perspective. Those of us who endlessly twist the regex so they arrive at something resembling the regex below, which was actually created to match email addresses³, aspire to match deterministically at any price and frequently are destined to fail, especially when working with data reflecting human-input.

^(?:(?!.*?[.]{2})[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[a-zA-Z0-9.+!%-]{1,64}|)|\"[a-zA-Z0-9.+!% -]{1,64}\")@[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9.-]+(.[a-z]{2,}|.[0-9]{1,})$

The nature of the regex matching is source of the problem. Regex-based matching will always result a binary outcome, strings will match or not. By the very definition regex-based matching is not fuzzy matching.

Pardigm shift … (just becasuse wee don’t menion this phrase often enough)

When you attempt to match things fuzzily you are signing up to a few assumptions:

Your matching reflects certain probabilistic assumptions or in other words, your match is not expected to be 100% accurate.
There is no “one right” method to do the matching, ways of calculating string distances may be less or more suitable for a given problem. Computationally expensive procedures may yield excellent result but prove impractical from the implementation perspective, and so on
Whereas for regex there is clear direction of improvement: it can be (almost) always tweaked more to account for one more ‘edge case’ the improvement direction

Example

Generating example that show inefficiency of regex when contrasted with string matching approach. The most obvious example is the one that will show mismatches on misspelled words. Let’s consider the following example. Two data sets contain a set of strings reflecting car manufactures, as shown below.

data_A <- tibble::tribble(
    ~ manufacturer, ~ price,
    "Ford Focus", 100,
    "Ford Mondeo", 120,
    "  Ford Corsa", 30,
    "Mercedes W205 C-Class", 90,
    "Mecedes X156 GLA-Class", 10
)

data_B <- tibble::tribble(
    ~ manufacturer, ~ subjective_rating,
    "Frod", "B",
    "mercedes" , "A"
)

Let’s say that we want to bring the subjective_rating column to the data_A. The first, common sense would to match on the actual manufacturer. The one could be tempted to get the first word from the manufacturer column and use it for matching. We could attempt to match using only brand name. For that purpose the most straightforward implementation would be to delete everything after space. As shown bellow, the first problem we are seeing that " Ford Corsa" was deleted as it starts with space.

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("tidyverse"))
data_A |> 
    mutate(manufacturer = str_remove(manufacturer, "\\s.*")) |> 
    left_join(data_B)

## Joining with `by = join_by(manufacturer)`

## # A tibble: 5 × 3
##   manufacturer price subjective_rating
##   <chr>        <dbl> <chr>            
## 1 "Ford"         100 <NA>             
## 2 "Ford"         120 <NA>             
## 3 ""              30 <NA>             
## 4 "Mercedes"      90 <NA>             
## 5 "Mecedes"       10 <NA>

We could solve that problem by running trimws or str_trim first, let’s do that. For better visibility the step is inserted as a separate call but we could easily wrap that call in the existing transformation. However, the results are still unsatisfactory.

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("tidyverse"))
data_A |> 
    mutate(manufacturer = str_trim(manufacturer),
           manufacturer = str_remove(manufacturer, "\\s.*")) |> 
    left_join(data_B)

## Joining with `by = join_by(manufacturer)`

## # A tibble: 5 × 3
##   manufacturer price subjective_rating
##   <chr>        <dbl> <chr>            
## 1 Ford           100 <NA>             
## 2 Ford           120 <NA>             
## 3 Ford            30 <NA>             
## 4 Mercedes        90 <NA>             
## 5 Mecedes         10 <NA>

The potential next step could be addressing the upper case / lower case challenge. After doing this, the records start to match but the approach proves inefficient. We can tweak our matching further using regex. If we want to match directly on a regex column we can use regex_left_join from the fuzzyjoin package. At this point the tables start to match but the overall conclusions are quite disappointing, we are facing either endlessly tweaking our string through regex or standalone transformation to arrive at a suitable match if we want to progress in that direction. We are also exposing ourselves to a risk that added row with misspelled name will break that logic. In an actual production environment there is a risk that substantial inflow of data will break our logic for a significant number of records.

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("tidyverse"))
data_A |> 
    mutate(manufacturer = str_trim(manufacturer),
           manufacturer = str_to_lower(manufacturer),
           manufacturer = str_remove(manufacturer, "\\s.*")) |> 
    fuzzyjoin::regex_left_join(data_B, by = "manufacturer")

## # A tibble: 5 × 4
##   manufacturer.x price manufacturer.y subjective_rating
##   <chr>          <dbl> <chr>          <chr>            
## 1 ford             100 <NA>           <NA>             
## 2 ford             120 <NA>           <NA>             
## 3 ford              30 <NA>           <NA>             
## 4 mercedes          90 mercedes       A                
## 5 mecedes           10 <NA>           <NA>

A “pragmatic programmer” approach …

At this junction it’s beneficial revise our initial assumptions. After working with this trivial sample data we can conclude that:

Those tables have no right to match in 100%, if we code for every single opportunity there is a strong chance that new data will through this approach through the window by introducing new spelling mistakes, spaces and so forth…
There is no consistency in mistakes, the data may contain superfluous spaces or odd capitalisation, we can’t form a assumption on what is the main problem to fix here.

A solution to this challenge would be to approach the matching problem from a probabilistic perspective. A first option would be to generate a function assessing how dissimilar are our strings. Jaro-Winkler string distance is a metric continuously used in computer science and computational statistics assessing how distant are give strings. The comparator package offers a convenient implementation of that function. For this example, I’m leaving the default option and forcing only ignoring strings.

library("comparator")
jw <- JaroWinkler(ignore_case = TRUE)
jw("Mercedes", "mecedes")

## [1] 0.9666667

The function returns distance between two strings and, expectedly, jw will return quite a high score for for common spelling mistakes. The score for dissimilar words will be much lower.

jw("Mercedes", "opel corsa zxc")

## [1] 0.5119048

We can attempt to implement the function in our matching further leverage the functions available in a fuzzyjoin package. The fuzzy_left_join requires for the matching function to require a boolean output so we can wrap actual results in an anonymous function⁴

fuzzyjoin::fuzzy_left_join(x = data_A, y = data_B, by = "manufacturer",
                           match_fun = function(x, y) { jw(x, y) >= 0.65}
                           )

## # A tibble: 5 × 4
##   manufacturer.x           price manufacturer.y subjective_rating
##   <chr>                    <dbl> <chr>          <chr>            
## 1 "Ford Focus"               100 Frod           B                
## 2 "Ford Mondeo"              120 Frod           B                
## 3 "  Ford Corsa"              30 Frod           B                
## 4 "Mercedes W205 C-Class"     90 mercedes       A                
## 5 "Mecedes X156 GLA-Class"    10 mercedes       A

Without any string transformations we are achieving reasonable match. The key word is here is reasonable. The proposed approach only makes sense if we agree that we are not looking for a perfect match but we are willing to accept reasonably good output.

So what

First be honest with what do you need, can you live with a few mismatched records? If you are building data to predict trends reflecting substantial populations the likely answer is yes, if you are building data set to email personalised marketing communication to existing customers the likely answer is no.

SO discussion on: Fuzzy Join with Partial String Match in R↩︎
The example originations from SO discussion on removing non-ASCII characters; this is actually one of the better answerers offered.↩︎
This is taken from a closed question validating email addresses; the SO hosts another, longer, discussion that offers detailed discussion on regex approach to validating emails↩︎
Anonymous function have simply no name and usually are used within other calls, like sapply, etc. For a discussion refer to the article on R-Bloggers.↩︎