Hybrid‐patent classification based on patent‐network analysis

Effective patent management is essential for organizations to maintain their competitive advantage. The classification of patents is a critical part of patent management and industrial analysis. This study proposes a hybrid‐patent‐classification approach that combines a novel patent‐network‐based classification method with three conventional classification methods to analyze query patents and predict their classes. The novel patent network contains various types of nodes that represent different features extracted from patent documents. The nodes are connected based on the relationship metrics derived from the patent metadata. The proposed classification method predicts a query patent's class by analyzing all reachable nodes in the patent network and calculating their relevance to the query patent. It then classifies the query patent with a modified k‐nearest neighbor classifier. To further improve the approach, we combine it with content‐based, citation‐based, and metadata‐based classification methods to develop a hybrid‐classification approach. We evaluate the performance of the hybrid approach on a test dataset of patent documents obtained from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and compare its performance with that of the three conventional methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed patent‐network‐based approach yields more accurate class predictions than the patent network‐based approach.