Patent ID: 7478106

Claim:
A computer-readable storage medium having stored and encoded thereon computer-executable instructions for performing on a computing device processing of a two-dimensional data set listing consumers in rows of the two-dimensional data set and listing products in columns of the two-dimensional data set, comprising: selecting a number of random consumers from the rows and all of the columns to generate a first subset of the two-dimensional data set; building a feature-selection prediction model using the first subset; processing the first subset using the feature-selection prediction model to obtain useful predictors, the useful predictors corresponding to products in the columns that are used to make a desired prediction, wherein the desired prediction is predicting which of the consumers would be interested in a target product; ranking the useful predictors based on usefulness in making the desired prediction; selecting a portion of the useful predictors based on their ranking; selecting all of the consumers in the rows and those columns listing products that are useful predictors to generate a second subset of the two-dimensional data set; processing the second subset using the feature-selection prediction model to obtain a target group containing a list of consumers likely to fulfill the desired prediction; and processing each consumer in the second subset for each of the useful predictors using the feature-selection prediction model to determine whether a probability that the consumer will be interested in the target product is greater than a threshold probability.