Patent Document ID: 20130103553
Application ID: 13299168
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for estimating the amount of activity (e.g., economic traffic, dollars, goods/services, etc.) between two entities (e.g., companies, firms, divisions, persons, sectors, etc.) with one entity acting as a customer and the other as a supplier in an exchange of goods, services, information, monies, etc., wherein (i) the individual customer-supplier activity amounts are to be derived from the measured total (or aggregated) inbound and outbound flows of each entity in two or more dimensions, (ii) at least some 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 the inbound or outbound distribution of activity flows for each entity to their customers or suppliers; and the method comprises: a. Obtaining a plurality of measured total (or aggregated) inbound and outbound flows (e.g., revenue, cost, sources of cash, uses of cash, goods or services sent and received, units of information sent and received, etc.) for each entity by the Chosen dimensions (e.g., revenue and cost totals, and additionally by geography, products, accounting categories, etc.) b. Obtaining a network map of customer-supplier relationships between entities sufficient to relate the measured (or aggregated) totals to the individual customer-supplier pairs, also sufficient to develop an approximate representation of the economic subset of interest, but not necessarily comprehensive or complete c. Creating a placeholder entity or entities to perform the role of the consumer, labor market, profit balancer, as well as any unknown entities d. Obtaining a plurality of known customer-supplier pair activity amounts from public or private data sources, as subject to involuntary or voluntary reporting requirements e. Performing at least one seed estimate for each unknown customer-supplier activity value, using probabilistic, statistical, or logical methods based on the number of connections remaining, historical relationships between groups of entities, known logical constraints, etc.