AI Sales Projections?

Hi all,

This is a bit of a long shot question, but I've not had much luck searching for a better solution.
 I'll cry myself to sleep if I don't get an answer, but I won't be surprised :)

We are trying to develop an application that determines for a given movie shown at a particular
theater how much the surrounding video stores are likely to rent out.

For the theater, we have its location and gross sales.  For the video stores, we have location,
demographics from the US Census, school schedules, weather reports, etc.  In other words, we are
flooded with information and all attempts at going from movie sales to rental projections have
been a simple ad hoc affair of choosing sets of data and throwing it randomly at the problem to
see if the results are close to reality.  The result has been a large, hard-coded set of
properties that is very inflexible and of questionable utility.

We're doing this in Perl, but I suspect we could might be able to switch languages if that's what
it takes.  Does anyone know of any similar problems and could you point me in an appropriate
direction?

Cheers,
Ovid

=====
Silence is Evil            http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/philosophy/indexdecency.htm
Ovid                       http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=17000
Web Programming with Perl  http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/

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