ON SOLVING THE CONTINUOUS DATA EDITING PROBLEM

The data editing problem is concerned with identifying the most likely source of errors in computerized data bases. Given a record that is k nown to fail one or more logical consistency edits, the objective is t o determine the minimum (possibly weighted) number of fields that coul d be changed in order to correct the record. While this problem can ea sily be formulated as a pure fixed-charge problem, it can be extremely difficult to solve under certain data conditions. In this paper we sh ow how a number of structural characteristics in this problem can be e xploited to dramatically reduce the computational time required to sol ve particularly difficult data editing problems.