Obviousness

I cannot conduct an obviousness analysis of US Patent 9846887 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as requested because the necessary "Prior Art section" containing specific prior art references is not provided in the current prompt.

To perform a proper obviousness analysis, I would require a list of prior art documents (e.g., patents, publications) that predate US Patent 9846887's priority date (August 30, 2012 [cite: US9846887B1 - Discovering neighborhood clusters and uses therefor - Google Patents]). Without these specific references, it is impossible to:

1. Identify the scope and content of the prior art.
2. Ascertain the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art.
3. Determine the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Formulate a reasoned argument regarding the motivation to combine references or the expectation of success in doing so.

While the patent text itself mentions publications like "Cheng et al. (“Exploring millions of footprints in location sharing services,” AAAIICWSM, 2011)," "D. M. Blei and P. I. Frazier, “Distance dependent Chinese restaurant processes,” J. Mach. Learn. Res., 2461-2488, November 2011," and "Ghosh et al., “Spatial distance dependent Chinese restaurant processes for image segmentation,” Neural Information Processing Systems, 2011" [cite: US9846887B1 - Discovering neighborhood clusters and uses therefor - Google Patents], these are cited within the patent and are not presented as a formal "Prior Art section" from which to draw. My instructions specifically state to "Use the results from the Prior Art section of this page" to perform this task.

Therefore, I am unable to provide the requested obviousness analysis.