Fuzzy Match not working

Hi All,

I'm a newbie in Alteryx and I'm trying to work with the Fuzzy match feature. I've seen several videos within the community and i don't understand In a basic example i'm working why it is not producing matches. Maybe you can light my way to understand what the issue is?

I'm attaching the example i'm running for reference.

thank you.

TEST_FROM_CERO.yxmd

Fuzzy Match

Accepted answers

ChrisTX

In the Fuzzy Match tool, select the Advanced Options for Output Unmatched Records and Generate Keys Only.

For your test data, you can see that none of the keys match. So none of the records will ever match.

Key matching is the first phase of a fuzzy match. If none of the keys match, no amount of tuning the thresholds will produce a match.

Fuzzy matching isn't perfect. Your test data shows how easily records don't match, even when you can easily identify records that you think "should" match.

I even tried Soundex with your test data. Same result, none of the keys matched.

All comments

NickSm

@rob_dup_535 , looks like with the "Last Name" match criteria, the last names aren't being scored highly enough of a match to be shown as a matched result. Running the fuzzy match with only the First Name as criteria did return some results.

There is a bit of an art to fuzzy matching, where you may be able to adjust some of the advanced settings within the match styles in the "Edit" section next to the match field to use a match style that better fits your data. Or potentially adjust the match weight of that field to be lower in factoring into the overall score.

Your settings / workflow are all correct though, just a matter of iterating through and fine tuning your fuzzy matching to get the best results.

Rob83

Thank you,

Actually i tried adjusting weights and threshold to 5 for the last name it doesn't produce any match.

I will try to tune some more and see how it goes.

Thanks again

docklandsirish

Just in case anyone else comes across this example in their quest for fuzzy matching knowledge:

- to get this working, I joined the first and last names together in a third column using a formual tool

- then in the Fuzzy Match tool config, I unticked 'Generate Keys for Each Word' and used Words and Digits Levenshtein - drop the Match Threshold to 50% in the config so you can see the MatchScores are working

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