Linking Electronic Health Records for Multiple Sclerosis Research: Comparative Study of Deterministic, Probabilistic, and Machine Learning Linkage Methods

Probabilistic linkage offers high linkage capacity by recovering matches missed by deterministic methods and proved to be both flexible and efficient, particularly in real-world scenarios where unique identifiers are lacking. This method achieved a great balance between recall and precision, enabling better integration of various data sources that could be useful in MS research.