Intelligent Information Management, 2012, 4, 284-290
http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/iim.2012.425040 Published Online October 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/iim)
A Study on Forecasting System of Patent Registration
Based on Bayesian Network
Gabjo Kim1, Sangsung Park1, Sunghae Jun2, Yosup Kim1, Dongjin Kang1, Dongsik Jang1*
1Division of Industrial Management Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea
2Department of Statistics, Cheongju University, Cheongju, South Korea
[e-mail], *
Received August 30, 2012; revised October 5, 2012; accepted October 13, 2012
ABSTRACT
Recently the importance of intellectual property has been increased. There has been various ways of research on analy-
sis of companies, forecast of technology and so on through patents and many investments of money and time. Unlike
traditional method of patent analysis such as company analysis, forecasting technologies, this research is to suggest the
ways to forecast registration and rejection of patents which help minimize the efforts to register patents. To do so, in-
formation such as inventors, applicants, application date, and IPC codes were extracted to be used as input variables for
analyzing Bayesian network. Especially, among various forms of Bayesian network, we used Tree Augmented NBN
(TAN) to forecast registration and rejection of patent. This is because, TAN was assumed to have dependence between
variables. As a result of this Bayesian network, it was shown that there are nearly more than 80% of accuracy to fore-
cast registration and rejection of patents. Therefore, we expect the minimization of time and cost of registration by fo-
recasting registration and rejection of R&D patent through this research.
Keywords: Bayesian Network; Patent Registration; Tree Augmented NBN; Forecast
1. Introduction
In general, display technology is technology that shows
various information on screen. From screen of mobile
phone that we encounter everyday life, the field of ap-
plication of display technology is applied to TV and PC
monitors as well as the automotive industry, military, and
medical care and spacecraft for battle. The market of
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) tends to grow with the
development of relevant technology according to in-
creasing demand of the LCD. In the 1990s, the market
was dominated by the PDP and LCD screen for large
equipment. In 2000s, however, as the market expanded to
small devices, the market of LCD screen had declined
and the LED industry tended to be in the limelight. Like
the case above, advanced technique often replace the
existing technology in the marketplace. Therefore, it is
required to continuously research related technology [1].
There have been many researches on new technologies to
dominate the market by introducing new products. Such
keen competitions within the country and internationally
has led to active development in display industry. The
most typical and rapidly emerging next-generation dis-
play technology is Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED).
OLED has faster response speed than that of LCD. Also,
it has excellent viewing angle and contrast ratio as it is a
self-luminous type. OLED materials market is expected
to enter a phase of full-scale growth in the second half of
2012. Diffusion of smart phones equipped with OLED is
expected to drive demand for OLED. Not only by strong
sales of Samsung smart phones, but also because OLED
are diffused to other brands, the penetration rate of
OLED into smart phone is expected to rise to 30% in
2014 from 20% in present [2].
With this trend, each country or company has put a lot
of efforts to obtain intellectual property rights before its
rivals to dominate the market. As a part of preoccupancy
of intellectual property rights in the field of R&D, a
number of research institutions are registered their results
as patent. With an increase in the importance of the pat-
ent, the number of patents filed in the country is increas-
ing year by year [3]. However, according to the Patent
Office, despite the large number of patent applications,
patent registration rate is 50% or less [4]. It generates a
problem that a lot of human resources, capital, time and
efforts put into register a patent could be wasted. Thus,
most researchers usually survey patent information on
patent DB in advance before they apply for a patent. At
this time, the investigation of patent information is
*Corresponding author.
C
opyright © 2012 SciRes. IIM

G. KIM ET AL. 285
mainly done by patent agencies or corporate patent de-
partments. Research should be based on expert and sub-
jective judgment. This method has a fatal defect if it
lacks of objectivity in evaluating the quality of the patent.
In this paper, we present a patent registration prediction
method that used by patent information to avoid subjec-
tive judgments.
2. Advanced Research
2.1. Related Literature
Until recently, studies on the patent have been used pri-
marily by mining the text of the specification and biblio-
graphic to analyze vacant technology. The data that was
used on this paper is application number, filing date,
publication number, publication date, IPC code and ex-
tracted keywords using the text mining. Tseng et al.
conducted a study to create a patent map using text min-
ing techniques to analyze the relationship between each
technology [5]. Subject to US 14 patents in the field of
biotechnology, using a simple regression analysis, Lin,
Chen and Wu revealed that the nationality of the patent
applicant, geographic location and the number of claims
are a statistically significant correlation with the number
of citations while there is a positive or negative correla-
tion between examination period and the number of cita-
tions partially [6]. Jun, Park and Jang used the patent
data with method of support vector machine and patent
matrix to predict the vacant technology in the field of
Management of Technology [7].
Previous studies have mainly done about bibliographic
item and analyzing of correlation and progress of tech-
nology by using text mining. Recently, researchers sug-
gested forecasting of registration and rejection of patent
using text mining. Jung, Park and Jang investigated the
existence patent registration in the field of Bluetooth,
solar and hard disk by using the registration refusal simi-
larity [8]. Our research is different from the previous
studies. We gathered OLED patent data from KIPRIS
and used as the raw data that contains novelty, rights,
scope of technology, collaboration of research develop-
ment, subdivision of technology, technology innovation
activity and technology importance.
2.2. Intellectual Property
Intellectual property right can be divided into three rights.
Industrial property right includes patent, utility model,
model design and trademark. Copyrights include creation
of culture and art such as music, art image and literature.
There is advanced intellectual property right that is be-
gun to be recognized as intellectual property right lately
according to the changes and rapid developments in the
social environment. It has economic value as well. It is
not an exaggeration to say that patent right occupies one
of the most important part of intellectual property rights.
Not all the inventions are registered of patents. To be
registered of a patent, it must meet several criteria. The
criteria of patent are divided to subjective requirements,
objective requirements and procedural requirements [9].
Subjective requirements are required to applicants. It
means that inventor must not imitate other inventions and
the inventor must have a right to apply for registering of
a patent by the law. To satisfy the objective requirements,
invention should be highly creative technical idea with
the law of nature. Also, it must have industrial applicabil-
ity, novelty and progressivity. In order to register of a
patent, applicants must apply for patent in accordance
with procedure that is required by the patent law as well
as the substantive requirements. In Republic of Korea, it
takes 10 to 16 months for registering of a patent by these
patent examination procedures. Furthermore, applicant
needs more finances that are required to pay patent office,
agent commission, registration fee and examination fee.
Therefore, companies and the government in the keen
global competition need patent forecasting systems for
minimization of time and cost of patent registration.
2.3. Bayesian Network
Data mining is a process of discovering meaningful in-
formation in large data repositories [10]. A Bayesian
network is one of the Data mining methods and a graphi-
cal model that encodes probabilistic relationships among
variables of interests [11]. Therefore, Bayesian network
is defined as Conditional Probability Table (CPT) and
Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that can be used to rep-
resent causal relationships among a set of random vari-
ables. In this regard each node represents variable and
DAG connected to nodes means relationship between
variables.
Figure 1 shows the network between random variables.
In this diagram, the node labeled A has three children,
labeled B, C and D, and the node labeled B, C and D has
one parent, labeled A. Generally, Bayesian network is a
model that represents the probability distribution of a set
of random variables in combination with dependent va-
riables as Bayes’ theorem can be used to calculate the
Figure 1. An example of resulting network.

G. KIM ET AL.
286
posterior probability [12]. Consequently, Bayesian net-
work can be formulated as in Equation (1) by conditional
probability and Bayes’ theorem.



PXYPY
PX

PY


PX
Y (1)
Bayes’ rule computes a conditional probability, based
on the probability that the hypothesis holds given the
observed data sample Y to judge the relative truth of the
hypothesis X and the prior probability of the hy-
pothesis X.
There are several types of Bayesian network such as
Naïve BN (NBN), General BN (GBN), Tree Augmented
NBN (TAN) etc. Among them, NBN is the most concise
and assumes that every attribute is independent from the
rest of the attributes, given the state of the class variable.
However, NBNs’ dependencies among these cannot be
modeled in realty. Freidman et al. proposed the Tree
Augmented NBN (TAN) in order to overcome the strong
independence assumptions imposed by the NBN. The
TAN is an extension of NB which allows additional
edges between the attributes of the network in order to
capture correlations among them [13].
3. Data and Variables Definition
This thesis is an analysis of Korea patent data of both
registered and rejected patents on OLED technology be-
tween 2000 and 2011. There had been 348 cases of reg-
istered patents and 90 of rejected patents on OLED tech-
nology. Total of 438 documents had been experimented.
For classification analysis, 1 was given to Registered pa-
tents and 0 was given to the rejected ones. In that, it was
expected to select input variables for analyzing technol-
ogy information and patent rights given by the gathered
data as shown in Table 1.
 Novelty
Patent is a monopoly obtained by introducing new in-
vention. The invention should be something innovative.
This characteristic helps to prevent duplicated research or
investment for companies, individuals or the government.
Application date in patent technology document shows
the period of invention and enables to find out patents’
new. On this thesis, application date was converted to
number 0 - 1 as application date index by the Method (2)
below [8].


Application dateMinApplica
ADI MaxApplication dateMinAppl


tion date
ication date
(2)
 Rights Scope of Technology
Claims on patent document are content of invention
that was written thoroughly in order to protect patent
rights. The number of request index enables the number
of inventions of companies or the government in fixed
quantity. Also, it can be used to measure the patent’s
range of invention and extent of rights. This can be con-
sidered to an index which measure the result of innova-
tion of companies or the government and this possibility
is based on logical reasoning that claims provide the right
information on activities of innovative technology rather
than the number of patents as substantial patented inven-
tions has been written on the claims [14].
 Collaboration of Research Development
The patent is not only submitted from the applicator
but also it is submitted by a group of people. This sug-
gests that by the number of collaborated application, it
can be an index showing collaboration with other com-
panies or independent development. By patent informa-
tion, using number of patent with co-applications, with
co-inventors is the most basic way to understand the re-
lationship of collaboration to research development [14].
On this thesis, the number of applicators or inventors was
regarded as information for collaboration of research
development and analyzed.
 Subdivision of Technology
IPC (International Patent Classification) is used world-
wide and is a treaty to search and classify patent docu-
ments and further to exchange technology between coun-
tries. IPC divides total technology into eight sections
which are from section A to H and each section is di-
vided into Class, Subclass, Group, and Subgroup.
Table 2 shows that detailed OLED technology was di-
vided or replaced as five sections of B, C, F, G, H and
used for analysis.
 Technology Innovation Activity
Activity Index (AI) is the major index to analyze the
present condition of specialization of technology, this
provides the information about which technology is con-
centrated to the technology innovation activity by com-
paring other company with certain company that is inter-
ested [14]. This shows the area of technology that is cen-
tered by certain companies or the government, it is not
analyzing by the size of the number of patents. The Me-
thod (3) shows the Activity Index.
The number of applicants'specific techical area
Total number of specific technical areas
AI Total number of applicants
Total number of patents
(3)
Activity Index is ranged from 0 to infinity and it gains
meanings by the number. With 1 as a standard number,
Activity Index is relatively less concentrated to the area
of technology when the certain company is smaller than
1 and vice versa [9].
On this research, it was assumed that if AI is lower
than 0.5, the concentration is also low, if it is between 0.5
- 1.5, the concentration is middle and the higher number

G. KIM ET AL.
287
Table 1. Independent variables.
Independent variables Character Type
1 Application date index Novelty Set
2 The number of claims Rights scope of technology Range
3 The number of applicants Collaboration of research development Range
4 The number of Inventors Collaboration of research development Range
5 IPC Subdivision of technology Set
6 AI Technology innovation activity Set
7 Of PCT Importance of technology Set
Table 2. OLED technology section and IPC code.
IPC Section Technology Description
B60R B Optical clock device Installation in a car
C03C C Glass composition Glass composition without silica
… … … …
H05B H Electric luminous material Device for production of electric luminous material
of 1.5 in order to divide them into three groups. which was trained. It shows that the total of 9 nodes and
13 arcs were produced. Also, it leads to the fact that there
is a tree relationship among input variables, which are
child nodes, while every input variable is depending on
whether class node is registered or not. Furthermore, it is
shown that every variable can impact on status of Regis-
tration and there are causal relationships among input
variables by application date index—AI, application date
index—PCT, application date index-the number of as-
signees, application date index-the number of inventors,
PCT—the number of claims. Tables 3-8 show each vari-
able and conditional probability number of status of reg-
istration.
 Importance of Technology
In patent document, international application and re-
lated information enable to quantitatively evaluate the
technology [15]. Generally budgets such as public com-
mission, translation fee, legal fee are required to apply
the patent and keep the registration abroad and this leads
to less number of international application. Because the
time, costs and efforts spent indirectly show level of pa-
tent technology, international application can be con-
nected to the technological importance and opportunity
in market places. This thesis checked status of interna-
tional application and gave number 1 when there had
been international application and number 0 when there
had been no international application. Tables 3-8 show the number of conditional probability
between each variable and the status of registration. Ta-
ble 3 explains the conditional probability application date
index-in the case of rejection, the probability is 0.068
when the index of applicant index is less than 0.2 and
that of 9.017 when application date index is less than 0.2.
In Table 4, variables of the number of claims have sub-
ordination only to status of registration and that of PCT.
Therefore, each column of the table of conditional prob-
ability has the numbers which variable of the number of
claims can have. It draws the formula below.
4. Experiments and Results
From theses input variables, Bayesian Network was se-
lected among many other datamining techniques that are
provided by SPSS Clementine. The type of Bayesian
Network used in this thesis is TAN. In order to set the
model, 90% of raw data is categorized as training set and
that of 10% as testing set.
Figure 2 is the result of TAN in Bayesian Network



The number of claims20.8 Of registration0, PCT00.917
20.8The number of claims41.6Of registration0, PCT00.077
41.6The number of claims62.4Of registration0, PCT00.001
62.4The number of claim
P
P
P
P




(4)


s83.2 Of registration0, PCT00.001
83.2The number of claimsOf registration0,PCT00.001P



G. KIM ET AL.
288
Figure 2. Bayesian network for patent registration.
Following Table 9 shows the result of experiments of
total 431 OLED patents data.
In reality, 17 rejected patents were actually expected to
be rejected. On the other hand, 332 patents were ex-
pected to be patented. This shows 80.97% of accuracy.
5. Conclusions
Recently, there has been keen competition between com-
panies and the government to protect their intellectual
properties resulted from R & D activity. This research is to
forecast the registration of patents and that of rejection or
acceptance in order to provide a model to minimize ex-
pense and time of registration. In that, this research used
Bayesian network algorithm to forecast the registration
and rejection of Korea patents in the area of OLED tech-
nology. From national patent data patent data of OLED
technology, the date of application, the claim, the infor-
mation of applicator and inventor, IPC code, AI, Interna-
Table 3. Conditional probabilities of application date index.
Parents Probability
Of Registration ≤0.2 0.2 - 0.4 0.4 - 0.6 0.6 - 0.8 >0.8
0 0.068 0.410 0.357 0.081 0.081
1 0.017 0.322 0.376 0.156 0.126
Table 4. Conditional probabilities of the number of claims.
Parents Probability
Of Registration Of PCT ≤20.8 20.8 - 41.6 41.6 - 62.4 62.4 - 83.2 >83.2
0 0 0.917 0.077 0.001 0.001 0.001
0 1 0.676 0.2 0.104 0.009 0.009
1 0 0.866 0.121 0.011
1 1 0.702 0.144 0.004 0.097 0.051
Table 5. Conditional probabilities of the number of inventors.
Parents Probability
Of Registration ADI ≤2.6 2.6 - 4.2 4.2 - 5.8 5.8 - 7.4 >7.4
0 ≤0.2 0.392 0.584 0.007 0.007 0.007
0 0.2 - 0.4 0.546 0.385 0.001 0.065 0.001
0 0.4 - 0.6 0.626 0.295 0.075 0.001 0.001
0 0.6 - 0.8 0.490 0.329 0.167 0.006 0.006
0 >0.8 0.167 0.812 0.006 0.006 0.006
1 ≤0.2 0.392 0.392 0.007 0.2 0.007
1 0.2 - 0.4 0.462 0.410 0.052 0.063 0.010
1 0.4 - 0.6 03638 0.225 0.081 0.054 -
1 0.6 - 0.8 0.347 0.303 0.065 0.238 0.044
1 >0.8 0.404 0.323 0.135 0.108 0.027

G. KIM ET AL. 289
Table 6. Conditional probabilities of PCT.
Parents Probability
Of Registration ADI 0 1
0 ≤0.2 0.980 0.019
0 0.2 - 0.4 0.932 0.067
0 0.4 - 0.6 0.738 0.261
0 0.6 - 0.8 0.822 0.177
0 >0.8 0.983 0.016
1 ≤0.2 0.788 0.211
1 0.2 - 0.4 0.925 0.074
1 0.4 - 0.6 0.900 0.099
1 0.6 - 0.8 0.954 0.045
1 >0.8 0.997 0.002
Table 7. Conditional probabilities of the number of applicants.
Parents Probability
Of Registration ADI ≤1.6 1.6 - 2.4 >2.4
0 ≤0.2 0.782 0.012 0.205
0 0.2 - 0.4 0.963 0.034 0.002
0 0.4 - 0.6 0.958 0.039 0.002
0 0.6 - 0.8 0.817 0.172 0.010
0 >0.8 0.978 0.010 0.010
1 ≤0.2 0.974 0.012 0.012
1 0.2 - 0.4 0.988 0.011 -
1 0.4 - 0.6 0.988 - -
1 0.6 - 0.8 0.997 0.001 0.001
1 >0.8 0.915 0.055 0.028
Table 8. Conditional probabilities of the number of IPC.
Parents Probability
Of Registration ADI B C F G H
0 ≤0.2 0.007 0.007 0.007 0.007 0.969
0 0.2 - 0.4 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.065 0.930
0 0.4 - 0.6 0.001 0.148 0.001 0.185 0.663
0 0.6 - 0.8 0.006 0.006 0.006 0.167 0.812
0 >0.8 0.006 0.006 0.167 0.006 0.812
1 ≤0.2 0.007 0.2 0.007 0.007 0.776
1 0.2 - 0.4 0.010 0.021 - 0.105 0.861
1 0.4 - 0.6 - 0.045 - 0.207 0.746
1 0.6 - 0.8 - 0.087 - 0.152 0.758
1 >0.8 0.135 0.027 0.054 0.162 0.619

G. KIM ET AL.
290
Table 9. Precision of total patents data.
Predict
Rejected Registered
Rejected 17 70
Actual
Registered 12 332
tional application were used as input variables for this
analysis. In order to verify the validity, 90% of raw data
was categorized as training set and that of 10% as testing
set. Also, this accuracy of the model in total data was
shown to be about 80.97%. Furthermore, reliance be-
tween each variables and status of registration were visu-
ally ensured by the network and it was able to forecast
registration and rejection through probability.
I expect this research to become a guide to forecast
research on registration and rejection of further patent
data. The following research enables to increase the ac-
curacy of forecast model about patent registration and
rejection on various technologies by using patent data as
variables to analyze index of various technology. Also,
this research used TAN which is formed to tree form
between variables among many different forms of Bayes-
ian network such as GBN, NBN etc. Hereafter, perform-
ance of various forms of Bayesian network need to com-
parative analysis by technology. Furthermore, grafting
various assortment data mining techniques like neural
network, SVM, decision tree should be needed for fur-
ther research.
6. Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Research Foun-
dation of Korea Gran funded by the Korean Government
(MEST) (NRF-R1A4007-2011-0026953).
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