--- title: "False positive" summary: "A false positive in entity resolution is a pair of records asserted to be the same entity when they are not — the error class that corrupts data rather than merely leaving it untidy." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-positive last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # False positive > A false positive in entity resolution is a pair of records asserted to be the same entity when they are not — the error class that corrupts data rather than merely leaving it untidy. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-positive Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Measurement ## How to read this 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](https://entitybind.com/glossary#measurement). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What false positive means A false positive is a pair of records asserted to be the same entity when they are not. It and the false negative are not equally expensive. A false negative leaves two records unmerged: the cost is duplication, a second invoice, a second account, a slightly wrong customer count. A false positive merges two real companies into one: the cost is a payment to the wrong bank details, a credit limit extended to the wrong legal person, a data subject's records mixed with a stranger's, and a correction that has to be propagated to every system that consumed the merged id. That asymmetry should drive the threshold, and often does not. Systems tuned to maximise F1 implicitly weight the two errors equally; systems tuned for a match-rate target weight false positives at zero, because a false positive still counts as a match. False positives cluster in identifiable places, which is what makes them tractable: same-stem corporate families, franchise networks, companies sharing a registered office at an agent's address, and truncated names whose discarded tokens were the discriminating ones. A resolver that has not measured itself on a fixture containing those cases has not measured itself on the cases that matter. Entity Bind's representative fixture is built to contain them — it is sibling-complete, so every live same-named company is pulled in — and its published false-bind count on that instrument is 0. Zero wrong bindings were observed across the historical six-shape recording and the separate domain fixture. Observed correctness was 1.0000 on accepted outcomes; this does not guarantee an error-free new workload. ## 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. - [Precision, recall and abstention](https://entitybind.com/guides/precision-recall-and-abstention): The precision-recall trade-off is usually described as a two-way choice, and in entity resolution that description is wrong. There is a third output — declining… - [The accuracy method](https://entitybind.com/accuracy): Every published rate with the population it was measured over, its interval and its fixture — including the input shapes that fail. - [How it works](https://entitybind.com/how-it-works): The seven-stage cascade in order, what each stage can settle on its own, and what it hands to the next. 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 free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [False bind](https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-bind): A false bind is Entity Bind's name for the error it treats as unacceptable: a record attached to the wrong company entity and returned as a decided match. - [Over-merge](https://entitybind.com/glossary/over-merge): An over-merge is a cluster containing records from more than one real entity — the failure that turns two customers, two suppliers or two counterparties into one. - [Precision](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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. - [Confidence floor](https://entitybind.com/glossary/confidence-floor): A confidence floor is the score below which a system refuses to return a match at all, expressed as an acceptance contract rather than as a promise about accuracy. - [u-probability](https://entitybind.com/glossary/u-probability): The u-probability of a comparison field is the probability that the field agrees by chance given that the pair is not a match — a measure of how common a value is, and therefore of how little an agreement proves. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [How to measure entity resolution accuracy](https://entitybind.com/guides/how-to-measure-entity-resolution-accuracy) (Guide): Precision, recall, abstention, pairwise versus B-cubed cluster metrics, Wilson intervals and out-of-fold evaluation. Why a single accuracy number for entity resolution is always meaningless, with worked arithmetic. ## 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. - [Precision](https://entitybind.com/glossary/precision) - [Recall](https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall) - [F1 score](https://entitybind.com/glossary/f1) - [B-cubed (B³)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/b-cubed) - [Pairwise metrics](https://entitybind.com/glossary/pairwise-metrics) - [Cluster metrics](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cluster-metrics) - [Recall@k](https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall-at-k) - [Calibration](https://entitybind.com/glossary/calibration) - [Expected calibration error (ECE)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/expected-calibration-error) - [Wilson interval](https://entitybind.com/glossary/wilson-interval) - [False bind](https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-bind) - [Over-merge](https://entitybind.com/glossary/over-merge) - [Fragmentation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/fragmentation) Previous, alphabetically: [False bind](https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-bind) · Next, alphabetically: [Fellegi–Sunter](https://entitybind.com/glossary/fellegi-sunter) ## Evidence basis 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. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-positive, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.