Exploring technological trends for patent evaluation

Patents are very important intangible assets that protect firm technologies and maintain market competitiveness. Thus, patent evaluation is critical for firm business strategy and innovation management. Currently patent evaluation mostly relies on some meta information of patents, such as number of forward/backward citations and number of claims. In this paper, we propose to identify patent technological trends, which carries information about technology evolution and trajectories among patents, to enable more effective and precise patent evaluation. We explore features to capture both the value of trends and the quality of patents within a trend, and perform patent evaluation to validate the extracted trends and features using patents in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the identified technological trends are able to capture patent value precisely. With the proposed trend related features extracted from our identified trends, we can improve patent evaluation performance significantly over the baseline using conventional features.