Patent ID: 8200514

Claim:
A computing system for making a price-related prediction of airline ticket prices for trips, comprising: a memory storing computer-executable instructions of: a component that provides flight information for airline flights for trips on various observation dates, each trip having one or more available flights, each trip having a departure airport and date and a return airport and date, wherein an observation date for flight information of a flight represents the date on which the flight information was current, the provided flight information for a flight including an actual price of the flight as of each observation date; a component that generates a feature vector for each trip for each observation date based on the provided flight information; a component that determines for each observation date for a trip what the price-related prediction should have been for the trip on each observation date by analyzing the actual prices of the flights of the trip as of later observation dates so that the determined price-related prediction accurately factors in the actual prices of the trip as of the later observation dates; a component that trains a classifier to make a price-related prediction for trips using the feature vectors and determined predictions for the prices as of observation dates for the trips; and a component that generates a price-related prediction for a target trip by applying the trained classifier to a feature vector generated based on flight information of the target trip; and a processor for executing the computer-executable instructions stored in the memory.