Fuzzy matching of product names

Question

I need to automatically match product names (cameras, laptops, tv-s etc) that come from different sources to a canonical name in the database.

For example \"

Answer 1

This is a problem of record linkage. The dedupe python library provides a complete implementation, but even if you don't use python, the documentation has a good overview of how to approach this problem.

Briefly, within the standard paradigm, this task is broken into three stages

1. Compare the fields, in this case just the name. You can use one or more comparator for this, for example an edit distance like the Levenshtein distance or something like the cosine distance that compares the number of common words.
2. Turn an array fo distance scores into a probability that a pair of records are truly about the same thing
3. Cluster those pairwise probability scores into groups of records that likely all refer to the same thing.