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>.

A set of functions to select the optimal block-length for a 
    dependent bootstrap (block-bootstrap). Includes the Hall, Horowitz, and Jing
    (1995) <doi:10.1093/biomet/82.3.561> subsampling-based cross-validation method, the 
    Politis and White (2004) <doi:10.1081/ETC-120028836> Spectral Density 
    Plug-in method, including the Patton, Politis, and White (2009)
    <doi:10.1080/07474930802459016> correction, and the Lahiri, Furukawa, and Lee
    (2007) <doi:10.1016/j.stamet.2006.08.002> nonparametric plug-in method, with 
    a corresponding set of S3 plot methods.

Some elementary matrix algebra tools are implemented to manage
    block matrices or partitioned matrix, i.e. "matrix of matrices"
    (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_matrix). The block matrix is here
    defined as a new S3 object. In this package, some methods for "matrix"
    object are rewritten for "blockmatrix" object. New methods are implemented.
    This package was created to solve equation systems with block matrices for
    the analysis of environmental vector time series .
    Bugs/comments/questions/collaboration of any kind are warmly welcomed.