US Patent 8359238 Grouping user features based on performance measures

In one embodiment, a method includes accessing metric values for one or more online advertising spaces for placing one or more online advertisements; generating a first user variable subgroup and a second user variable subgroup from a user variable group; deriving first metric values for the first user variable subgroup; deriving second metric values for the second user variable subgroup; for each of the online advertising metrics, using a particular statistical model to calculate a statistical score based on the first and second metric values with respect to the online advertising metric and the first and second user variable subgroups; performing a split test on the first user variable subgroup and the second user variable subgroup; and splitting the user variable group into two separate user variable groups if the first and second variable subgroups pass the split test.