Method for estimating flows between economic entities

• Main Author: McGill, Eric
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 20.09.2022
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; COUNTING; DATA PROCESSING SYSTEMS OR METHODS, SPECIALLY ADAPTED FORADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL, SUPERVISORYOR FORECASTING PURPOSES; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; PHYSICS; SYSTEMS OR METHODS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE,COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL, SUPERVISORY OR FORECASTINGPURPOSES, NOT OTHERWISE PROVIDED FOR

In economic networks, it is not currently possible to observe all flows between entities. Only a portion of relationships between firms is known publicly, and only a portion of those relationships is assigned values through reporting requirements by the regulating public institutions. Therefore, obtaining a plurality of documents that describe companies and their known connections through public sources will necessarily result in an incomplete matrix of customer-supplier relationships containing some mixture of known relationships with known values, known relationships with unknown values, and unknown relationships with unknown values. A method and system is presented to obtain a best estimate of all unknown values given the known information in the network, including an amount that is assigned to unknown entities to be discovered later.