blocking

1.0.3

Various Blocking Methods for Entity Resolution

1packages depend

4.5Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

12/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Maciej BeręsewiczFirst published 2025-06-134 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

The goal of 'blocking' is to provide blocking methods for record linkage and deduplication using approximate nearest neighbour (ANN) algorithms and graph techniques. It supports multiple ANN implementations via 'rnndescent', 'RcppHNSW', 'RcppAnnoy', and 'mlpack' packages, and provides integration with the 'reclin2' package. The package generates shingles from character strings and similarity vectors for record comparison, and includes evaluation metrics for assessing blocking performance including false positive rate (FPR) and false negative rate (FNR) estimates. For details see: Papadakis et al. (2020) doi:10.1145/3377455, Steorts et al. (2014) doi:10.1007/978-3-319-11257-2_20, Dasylva and Goussanou (2021) https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/12-001-X202100200002, Dasylva and Goussanou (2022) doi:10.1007/s42081-022-00153-3.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("blocking", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("ncn-foreigners/blocking")

Development version from ncn-foreigners/blocking. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-blocking

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-blocking

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

1ERROR12OK

Failing flavors

ERROR r-oldrel-macos-arm64

Slowest check: 9.6 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang

Check history

ERROR2026-07-01
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-06-09
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-06-08
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

Documentation signals are not tracked yet for this package.

Downloads

4.5K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #6,373 · ~12/day · ~373/mo

blocking Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

37630 days

1.5K90 days

4.5K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on190 r2u82 autocran

Repository

GitHub ↗ ncn-foreigners/blocking

14Stars

0Forks

2Open issues

0Open PRs

2Releases

193Commits

3Contributors

annoyapproximate-nearest-neighbor-searchdeduplicationentity-resolutionhnswigraphrecord-linkage

193 commits · Last activity 2026-06-30 · 0% stars, 30d

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

3 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 3 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/ncn-foreigners/blocking on 2026-07-19.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

Docs source (1)

README.Rmd

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

13 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 4.1.0

Imports (12)

text2vec tokenizers RcppHNSW RcppAnnoy mlpack rnndescent igraph data.tablemethodsreadrutilsMatrix

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (4)

tinytest knitr rmarkdown reclin2

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

1direct

0indirect

automatedRecLin

Code & Tests

Datasets

People & History

People (2)

Maintainer (1)

Maciej Beręsewicz

Author, Maintainer

Authors (2)

Maciej Beręsewicz

Author, Maintainer

Adam Struzik

Author, Contractor

Package Timeline

4 releases. R releases are shown for context.

1.0.3Latest
2026-06-30 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.0.2
2026-03-11 · diff ↗
1.0.1
2025-06-18 · diff ↗
1.0.0
2025-06-13
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11

Package metadata

First published: 2025-06-13
Total releases: 4 / 1 yrs
License: GPL-3 OSI
Download size: 1.9 MB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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