Patent Document ID: 9092821
Application ID: 13299168
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method implemented on a computer in relation to a database, the method comprising: estimating the amount of activity between a first entity and a second entity, wherein the first entity is a customer and the second entity is a supplier in an exchange of goods, services, information, or monies, and wherein (i) individual customer-supplier activity amounts are derived from a measured total of inbound and outbound flows of the first and second entity in two or more dimensions, (ii) at least some portion of the measured total inbound and outbound flows are aggregates of more than one customer-supplier relationship, and (iii) there is a non-trivial probabilistic or statistical method that can produce estimated seed values for inbound or outbound distribution of activity flows for the first and second entity to other customers or suppliers, the estimation performed by one or more processors of the computer by: a. computing a plurality of measured total inbound and outbound flows for the first and second entity by the two or more dimensions based on data collected from a plurality of sources, said data relating to relationships between a plurality of entities, wherein the plurality of sources includes 10-K's, 10-Q's, press releases, company presentations, websites, interviews, and analyst estimates; b. creating a database-stored network map of customer-supplier relationships between the plurality of entities sufficient to relate the measured totals to individual customer-supplier pairs, and also sufficient to develop an approximate representation of the economic subset of interest; c. creating a placeholder entity to perform the role of consumer, labor market, profit balancer, and any unknown entities in the database-stored network map; d. utilizing a plurality of known customer-supplier pair activity amounts from the plurality of sources, as subject to involuntary or voluntary reporting requirements to estimate at least one seed estimate for each unknown customer-supplier activity value, using the probabilistic or statistical method based on a number of connections remaining in the database-stored network map, historical relationships between groups of entities in the plurality of entities, and known logical constraints; and e. using the at least one seed estimate to update values in the database-stored network map, so that the network map includes all known values and estimates regarding transactions that never actually occurred and stored in the database-stored network map.