Predicting litigation likelihood and time to litigation for patents

Abstract: Patent lawsuits are costly and time-consuming. An ability to forecast a patent litigation and time to litigation allows companies to better allocate budget and time in managing their patent portfolios. We develop predictive models for estimating the likelihood of litigation for patents and the expected time to litigation based on both textual and non-textual features. Our work focuses on improving the state-of-the-art by relying on a different set of features and employing more sophisticated algorithms with more realistic data. The rate of patent litigations is very low, which consequently makes the problem difficult. The initial model for predicting the likelihood is further modified to capture a time-to-litigation perspective.