ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,493,661, issued on Dec. 9, was assigned to eBay Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).
"Similarity sensitive diversity" was invented by Yuyan Wang (San Jose, Calif.), Yan Liang (San Jose, Calif.), Aritra Mandal (San Jose, Calif.) and Daniel Tunkelang (San Jose, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Similarity sensitive diversity is utilized to measure variation in a distribution of item listings along one or more categories. A cosine similarity between category vectors of each category pair in a set of categories is determined and utilized to generate a pairwise similarity matrix. The pairwise similarity matrix may be pruned to remove category pairs be...