US Patent 11003643 Multi-level conflict-free entity clusterings

The present disclosure relates clustering similar data records together in a hierarchical clustering scheme. Each tier in a cluster corresponds to a minimal match score, which reflects a degree of confidence. In this respect, a higher confidence may lead to smaller sized clusters while a lower confidence may lead to larger sized clusters. Ordinal classification may be used to generate hierarchical clusters. In some embodiments, hierarchical clustering with conflict resolution is used to resolve user-defined hard conflicts in each tier of the clustering results.