Patent ID: 8676799

Claim:
A computer-implemented method, comprising: storing, in one or more data processing apparatuses, data identifying a plurality of geographic entities; incrementally generating clusters of the plurality of geographic entities using a clustering algorithm, with the one or more data processing apparatuses, by identifying a plurality of clusters, and repeating the following actions until a threshold condition is satisfied with respect to a cluster measurement of the clusters: assigning one or more of the plurality of geographic entities to the clusters, wherein a geographic entity is assigned to a cluster that is the closest to the geographic entity according to a distance metric; determining a cluster measurement for the clusters from a quantification of an attribute of each geographic entity assigned to a cluster, the attribute comprising an experiment-specific attribute of the one or more geographic entities; storing cluster data associating a number of geographic entities assigned to clusters and the determined cluster measurement; wherein a different clustering algorithm is used each time to generate the clusters, when the threshold condition is not satisfied; and analyzing the determined cluster measurement for each of one or more of the number of geographic entities to select a particular number of geographic entities when the threshold condition is satisfied.