F1 score
The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under measurement.
How you tell whether any of it worked, and which numbers may not be quoted without which other numbers.
every figure, with its population →What F1 score means
F1 = 2PR/(P+R). It is a summary, not a diagnosis. The harmonic mean is used rather than the arithmetic one because it punishes imbalance: a system with precision 1.0 and recall 0.1 has an arithmetic mean of 0.55 and an F1 of 0.18, which is the better summary of a system that finds a tenth of what it should.
Its convenience is also its problem. Two systems with the same F1 can behave completely differently — one over-merging, the other abstaining — and in entity resolution those two behaviours have wildly different costs. A wrong merge in a payments master can send money to the wrong company; a missed merge costs a duplicate record. F1 weights them equally, and no business does.
F1 is also ambiguous until the unit is stated. Pairwise F1 scores decisions about pairs of records; cluster-level F1, such as B-cubed, scores whether each record ended up with the right neighbours. The two can differ by a wide margin on the same run, and quoting the flattering one is the most common sleight of hand in this category.
Entity Bind therefore publishes cluster F1 from both of its instruments and never averages them. The live-adjudicated recording of 2026-08-29 and the continuous-integration gate of 2026-09-05, whose cluster F1 is 0.7584, are different measurements over different fixtures — B-cubed cluster F1 on the gate's own 705-record fixture, held as a regression ratchet against a 0.75 floor rather than offered as a headline. It reads far below the live recording's 0.9646 because an unresolved record is a predicted singleton and all 205 name-only arrivals on this fixture abstain by construction, splitting the families they belong to. The two cluster figures come from different instruments over different fixtures and are never averaged.
Where this shows up in Entity Bind
Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.
- How to measure entity resolution accuracyThere is no single accuracy number for an entity resolution system, and any vendor quoting one is quoting a property of their fixture rather than of their engine.Open
- The accuracy methodEvery published rate with the population it was measured over, its interval and its fixture — including the input shapes that fail.Open
- The audit packThe fixtures, the verdict logs and the replay path: what an evaluator needs to re-run a published rate for themselves.Open
The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.
Start freeThe terms next to this one
Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.
Precision
Precision is the share of the matches a system asserted that were correct — and it is meaningless without the share of records the system was willing to decide at all.
Recall
Recall is the share of the true matches present in the data that a system actually found, and it is the metric that abstention costs you.
B-cubed (B³)
B-cubed is a cluster-level evaluation metric that scores precision and recall from the point of view of each individual record, asking what share of its assigned cluster genuinely belongs with it and what share of its true family it was placed with.
Cluster metrics
Cluster metrics evaluate the groups a resolver produced rather than the pairs it judged, which is the only way to see errors that only appear once pairwise decisions are chained into entities.
Pairwise metrics
Pairwise metrics evaluate a resolver one candidate pair at a time — did it correctly decide that these two records are or are not the same entity — and they systematically flatter systems whose errors chain together.
The other 13 terms on this shelf
How you tell whether any of it worked, and which numbers may not be quoted without which other numbers.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
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