In addition, you are talking about the applicant association analysis, that is, by analyzing whether there are cooperative inventions between applicants, you can know the technical status of applicants.
And the merger you said is to clean the applicants, that is, to merge one applicant's application under a different name or branch. Of course, you need not only patent statistics, but also the characterization of the applicant's relationship, which is not the scope of patent analysis. You need to know which branches of the company have been merged by that company. At present, the simple cleaning function can only be provided by charging software, but you can also make statistics by yourself through excel tables. For example, analyze the patents of 3m Company and directly enter the word "3m" in the applicant list, so that 3m Company, 3m Innovation Technology and 3m International Company will all come out, so that you may have a comprehensive understanding of how much 3m Company has applied for. Of course, the application of branches is not so good, you have to lay a good foundation first.
Patent analysis can be complex or simple, depending on your needs.