Machine learning-based patent quality metric

A machine-learning based artificial intelligence device for finding an estimate of patent quality, such as patent lifetime or term is disclosed. Such a device may receive a first set of patent data and generate a list of binary classifiers. A candidate set of binary classifiers may be selected and using a heuristic search, for example an artificial neural network (ANN), a genetic algorithm, a final set of binary classifiers is found by maximizing iteratively a yield according to a cost function, such an area under a curve (AUC) of a receiver operating characteristic (ROC). The device may then receive patent information for a target patent and report an estimate of patent quality according to the final set of binary classifiers.