An assessment of the Nam Pehchan computer program for the identification of names of south Asian ethnic origin

Abstract

The Nam Pehchan program quickly identified a high proportion of the names classified as south Asian by the reference standard, but the high false positive rate means that the program alone is not an adequate single strategy. The time-consuming process of inspection of program negatives for large data sets can be substantially reduced by comparison with dictionaries of common non south Asian names.