Patent ID: 7739314

Claim:
A computer program product, encoded on a machine-readable storage device, comprising instructions that when executed by a processor cause a data processing apparatus to: obtain a respective interest set for each of multiple users, each interest set being a set of elements, each element representing a respective item in which the respective user has expressed interest through interaction with a data processing system; for each of the multiple users, apply an i-th hash function to each element of the interest set of the user to obtain a respective function value corresponding to the respective element, for each integer i between 1 and k, the k hash functions being distinct each from the others, and determine, from the function values obtained from the k hash functions, k hash values of the respective interest set, wherein the i-th hash value of the respective interest set is a minimum value among the function values obtained by applying the i-th hash function to the elements of interest set of the user, and where k is an integer greater than or equal to 1; and assign each of the multiple users to each of k clusters, the i-th cluster being represented by the i-th hash value of the respective interest set of the respective user, wherein the assignment of each of the multiple users to k clusters is done without regard to the assignment of any of the other users to k clusters.