Patent ID: 6904409

Claim:
A method to be used by or for an entity which transacts with customers to provide the customers with goods or services, and which records attributes of customer transactions, referred to as profile variables, comprising at least one of time or duration of a transaction, nature or amount of the thing contracted for, or other transactional attributes having two or more possible values and lending themselves to treatment as statistical variables, for the purpose of distinguishing customers by their records of transactional behavior, the method comprising: a) from one or more new transactions with a customer, obtaining at least one new value of a profile variable and storing said value in a computer-accessible medium; b) using a computer to access, from a storage medium, a histogram in which: (i) two or more ranges, denominated bins, of possible values for the profile variable are represented; (ii) a relative frequency is recorded with which previously obtained values of the profile variable fall in each bin; and (iii) the bins are not all equal but instead are adapted to discriminate between a general customer population and a target customer population by yielding a greater average weighted Kullback-Liebler distance between said population than all-equal bins would yield; c) using the computer to select that bin in which the newly obtained value falls; and d) using the computer to update the relative frequencies recorded in the histogram so as to include in the histogram the effect of adding the newly obtained value to the selected bin.