Embodiments of the present invention may be used in the generation of an overall weight from the comparison of various attributes of data records, where the linking of the data records is dependent on the overall weight. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention may calculate a false positive penalty based on a set of results, each of the set of results based on a comparison of an attribute. The false positive penalty may be subtracted from the overall weight generated from the comparison of the attributes of data records to adjust the overall weight. By configuring which attributes of the data records are used as the set of attributes for generating the false positive penalty, and the penalties associated with a particular combination of results for the comparisons of these attributes, the incidence of false positives in the linking of data records may be significantly reduced.