Patent ID: 7428526

Claim:
A segmentation system for classifying consumers in clusters, comprising: means for generating a plurality of classification trees each including both behavioral and demographic consumers, segmenting variables for classifying a given consumer population, each of said classification trees including a plurality of decision nodes and a plurality of terminal nodes, and producing a consumer cluster set having a plurality of consumer clusters represented by the terminal nodes, each decision node indicating a certain portion of the consumer population and splitting the certain portion of the consumer population into at least two other nodes in response to one of the consumer segmenting variables; and means for searching said consumer cluster sets for an optimal consumer cluster set that optimizes a measure of the behavioral and demographic data, wherein consumers in each consumer cluster of said plurality of consumer clusters in the optimal consumer cluster set have similar behavioral and demographic characteristics to each other and different behavioral or demographic characteristics from consumers in all other consumer clusters of said plurality of consumer clusters in the optimal consumer cluster set, wherein the means for searching includes: means for storing profile definitions data for defining evaluation profiles to evaluate partitioning of the consumer population; means for determining counts for each of the decision nodes of each of the classification trees, the counts including a right split count, a left split count, and a total count for each of the decision nodes; means for storing profile data in the form of summaries of the counts; means for storing segment definitions data including variables used to define segments; and means for comparing performance of the classification trees based on stored profile definitions data, profile data, and segment definitions data to determine the classification tree producing the optimal consumer cluster set, whereby the consumer clusters in the optimal consumer cluster set are used to focus marketing on groups of consumers.