Sustainable Technology Analysis of Blockchain Using Generalized Additive Modeling
Blockchain is a secure distributed management technology for data. Until now, blockchain technology has been intensively developed in financial fields such as Bitcoin. As the blockchain technology develops, the application fields of blockchain are expected to further expand. We proposed a technology analysis method for sustainability of blockchain technology. We analyzed the patent documents related to blockchain for sustainable technology analysis. To carry out the technology analysis, we preprocessed the patent documents and built a structure data, document term matrix. In general, most elements of this matrix are zeros, so it is very skewed. Due to the skewness, technology analysis by traditional methods of statistics has analytical difficulty. To overcome this problem, we proposed a technology analysis method based on generalized additive modeling. To show how our proposed method can be applied to practical fields, we collected and analyzed the patent documents of blockchain technology.