Patent ID: 8364678

Claim:
A segmentation system for classifying consumers in clusters, comprising: a partitioning module, executed by a processor, to generate a plurality of classification trees, each of the plurality of classification trees including both behavioral and demographic consumer segmenting variables to classify a consumer population, each of the plurality of classification trees further including a plurality of decision nodes and a plurality of terminal nodes, each of the plurality of classification trees to produce a consumer cluster set having a plurality of consumer clusters represented by the terminal nodes, each decision node to indicate a portion of the consumer population and to split the portion of the consumer population into at least two other nodes in accordance with one of the consumer segmenting variables, the partitioning module to search the consumer cluster sets for an optimal consumer cluster set that optimizes a measure of the behavioral and demographic data, and consumers in each consumer cluster of the plurality of consumer clusters in the optimal consumer cluster set having similar behavioral and demographic characteristics to each other and at least one behavioral or demographic characteristic from consumers in other consumer clusters of the plurality of consumer clusters in the optimal consumer cluster set; a profile definitions module, executed by the processor, to store profile definitions data to define evaluation profiles to evaluate partitioning of the consumer population, the partitioning module to determine a count for each of the decision nodes of each of the classification trees, at least one of the counts including a right split count, a left split count, and a total count for the corresponding decision node; a profile data module, executed by the processor, to store summaries of the counts; and a segment definitions module, executed by the processor, to store segment definitions data including variables used to define segments, the partitioning module to compare performance of the classification trees based on the stored profile definitions data, the summaries of the count, and the segment definitions data to determine the classification tree producing the optimal consumer cluster set, the consumer clusters in the optimal consumer cluster set are to focus marketing on groups of consumers.