Maximizing Linkage in Address Data: Spatial, Exact, and Fuzzy Matching

High quality record linkages are critical for enriching survey data with alternative data sources. To enhance the American Community Survey (ACS) (US Census Bureau, 2025), we evaluated several options to match commercially available property data to housing unit records in the ACS and the Census Master Address File (MAF) (US Census Bureau, 2022) data, with the ultimate goal of supplementing data collected in the survey with the commercial property data. Techniques to match address data come in two flavors: spatial matching and address matching. Spatial matching is done by overlaying commercial boundary shape files on the lat-long coordinates on the MAF to associate Census housing unit records to commercial property parcel records. This method is useful because it does not require matching of text fields, but performs poorly when parcels include many housing units (e.g., large apartment buildings). Address matching, or entity resolution at the address level, links records across the two sources based on the content of various address fields, and offers the possibility of disambiguating multiple matches and matching objects that cannot be successfully assigned a unique match through spatial matching. Several approaches are available for address matching, including rule-based, deterministic, fuzzy, and probabilistic methods. In our article we summarize literature comparing various combinations of spatial and address matching techniques to illustrate the trade-off between linkage rates and linkage quality. We also consider hybrid solutions that leverage spatial matching as well as several types of address matching to maximize high quality linkages for our research and discuss future directions such as incorporating probabilistic matching as an added step.