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The Royal Bank of Canada is looking to patent several artificial-intelligence inventions, including one that could predict when consumers are about to make major purchases, public filings show.

Toronto-based RBC, Canada’s biggest bank, has filed several AI-related applications that were made public in December, according to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s patent database.

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One patent application describes a computer system that could receive transaction data and create “structured” data in which purchases are identified and labelled. A “recurrent neural network” would then be trained to build a model that could be used to predict the likelihood of a purchase.

A deeper description of the system in the filing — which notes the scope of the application is not meant to be limited to its various “embodiments,” the specific examples of how the invention could be used — shows a computer processor receiving raw data from sources such as retailers or banks. As another example, “bureau information” about loans that were taken out by clients could be fed in as well.