Exactly..

All your first steps are, is to categorize the Fav and how strong or the gap over the 2nd fav. and to find correlations in the odds to finished odds nothing more or nothing less.

You will be testing as many variables (in formguides or tipsheets) as possible to find ones with a correlation and know which ones don't.

I didn't tell you, but once you find a variable or combination, you would then breakdown this down into subsets of races based on the fav odds <3.00 etc.

Of course there is holes in what I have been explaining, the above approach is to provide very good first order approximation to those precious crowd odds.

Just with the above information I'm able to provide trifecta combinations that provide positive expectations for each race catergory.

Once you have completed the above your then ready to move onto actually using your own handicapping in "cluster analysis".