Learning and Predicting Patent Technology Reuse Trajectories from Emergence-Time Signals

Abstract

Forecasting how a newly emerged patent technology will be reused is central to technology intelligence, but reuse-pattern labels do not exist in advance: they must be constructed from the trajectories themselves, and how they are constructed determines what a forecast means. We study $201{,}710$ novel patent technologies (first-time IPC code pairings, USPTO 2002--2022). Our primary labeling applies $k$-means in the latent space of a GRU autoencoder trained on the $20$-year reuse trajectories, using no hand-crafted features; to our knowledge this is the first use of a learned sequence representation for this task. Seven emergence-time features, observable in a technology's first year, recover these labels at a one-vs-rest macro ROC-AUC of $0.914$, but the calendar year of emergence alone reaches $0.874$. A replication on technologies observed for ten full years, none of them right-censored, indicates that this calendar-year effect mainly reflects change over time in what was patented. Separately we cluster the emergence-time features themselves, after Fractal Autoencoder feature selection. That emergence-profile partition agrees with the GRU-based labels only marginally above chance (Adjusted Rand Index $\approx 0.04$), so a partition of emergence-time features is not a reuse-pattern taxonomy and should not be read as one. On a trajectory-shape task following the published construction, GBDT reaches $0.831$ with all seven features and $0.740$ with the selected subset; the published $0.728$, from a different corpus and labeling, is a reference point rather than a benchmark. Two features are additionally left-truncated for the earliest cohorts, which we quantify.