Patent ID: 8839291

Claim:
A system, comprising: a data processing apparatus; and software stored on a computer storage apparatus and comprising instructions executable by the data processing apparatus and upon such execution cause the data processing apparatus to perform operations comprising: accessing ratings data describing, for each of a plurality of first channel time blocks, demographic characteristics of a viewing audience of the channel time block; determining, for each of the demographic characteristics described by the ratings data, a respective central tendency value of the demographic characteristic; identifying, for each of the demographic characteristics described by the ratings data, a subset of first channel time blocks, each first channel time block in the subset having a demographic characteristic value that meet a threshold with respect to the respective central tendency value of the demographic characteristic; accessing segment data describing, for each of the plurality of first channel time blocks and a plurality of second channel time blocks for which demographic characteristics are not described by the ratings data, segment characteristics of a viewing audience of the channel time blocks, the segment data being data determined independently from the ratings data; and for each of the second channel time blocks: determining, from the segment data, respective similarity measures that measure the similarity of the second channel time block to each of the first channel time blocks in the subset of first channel time blocks; and determining estimated ratings data describing demographic characteristics of a viewing audience of the second channel time block from the respective similarity measures and the demographic characteristics of one or more of the first channel time blocks in the subset of first channel time blocks.