The World Wide Web (WWW) continues to grow at an astounding rate in both the sheer volume of tra#c and the size and complexity of Web sites. The complexity of tasks such as Web site design, Web server design, and of simply navigating through a Web site have increased along with this growth. An important input to these design tasks is the analysis of how a Web site is being used. Usage analysis includes straightforward statistics, such as page access frequency, as well as more sophisticated forms of analysis, such as finding the common traversal paths through a Web site. Web Usage Mining is the application of data mining techniques to usage logs of large Web data repositories in order to produce results that can be used in the design tasks mentioned above. However, there are several preprocessing tasks that must be performed prior to applying data mining algorithms to the data collected from server logs. This paper presents several data preparation techniques in order to identify unique users and user sessions. Also, a method to divide user sessions into semantically meaningful transactions is defined and successfully tested against two other methods. Transactions identified by the proposed methods are used to discover association rules from real world data using the WEBMINER system [15].

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Web usage mining, possibly used in conjunction with standard approaches to personalization such as collaborative filtering, can help address some of the shortcomings of these techniques, including reliance on subjective user ratings, lack of scalability, and poor performance in the face of high-dimensional and sparse data. However, the discovery of patterns from usage data by itself is not sufficient for performing the personalization tasks. The critical step is the effective derivation of good quality and useful (i.e., actionable) "aggregate usage profiles" from these patterns. In this paper we present and experimentally evaluate two techniques, based on clustering of user transactions and clustering of pageviews, in order to discover overlapping aggregate profiles that can be effectively used by recommender systems for real-time Web personalization. We evaluate these techniques both in terms of the quality of the individual profiles generated, as well as in the context of providing recommendations as an integrated part of a personalization engine. In particular, our results indicate that using the generated aggregate profiles, we can achieve effective personalization at early stages of users' visits to a site, based only on anonymous clickstream data and without the benefit of explicit input by these users or deeper knowledge about them.

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Recent proposals have suggested Web usage mining as an enabling mechanism to overcome the problems associated with more traditional Web personalization techniques such as collaborative or contentbased filtering. These problems include lack of scalability, reliance on subjective user ratings or static profiles, and the inability to capture a richer set of semantic relationships among objects (in content-based systems). Yet, usage-based personalization can be problematic when little usage data is available pertaining to some objects or when the site contentchanges regularly.For more effective personalization, both usage and content attributes of a site must be integrated into a Web mining framework and used by the recommendation engine in a uniform manner. In this

Web Usage Mining is the application of data mining techniques to Web clickstream data in order to extract usage patterns. As Web sites continue to grow in size and complexity, the results of Web Usage Mining have become critical for a number of applications such as Web site design, business and marketing decision support, personalization, usability studies, and network trac analysis. The two major challenges involved in Web Usage Mining are preprocessing the raw data to provide an accurate picture of how a site is being used, and ltering the results of the various data mining algorithms in order to present only the rules and patterns that are potentially interesting. This thesis develops and tests an architecture and algorithms for performing Web Usage Mining. An evidence combination framework referred to as the information lter is developed to compare and combine usage, content, and structure information about a Web site. The information lter automatically identi es the discovered ...

Web usage mining, possibly used in conjunction with standard approaches to personalization such as collaborative filtering, can help address some of the shortcomings of these techniques, including reliance on subjective user ratings, lack of scalability, and poor performance in the face high-dimensional and sparse data. However, the discovery of patterns from usage data by itself is not sufficient for performing the personalization tasks. The critical step is the effective derivation of good quality and useful (i.e., actionable) "aggregate usage profiles" from these patterns. In this paper we present and experimentally evaluate two techniques, based on clustering of user transactions and clustering of pageviews, in order to discover overlapping aggregate profiles that can be effectively used by recommender systems for real-time personalization. We evaluate these techniques both in terms of the quality of the individual profiles generated, as well as in the context of providing recomme...

. Web Usage Mining is the application of data mining techniques to large Web data repositories in order to extract usage patterns. As with many data mining application domains, the identification of patterns that are considered interesting is a problem that must be solved in addition to simply generating them. A necessary step in identifying interesting results is quantifying what is considered uninteresting in order to form a basis for comparison. Several research efforts have relied on manually generated sets of uninteresting rules. However, manual generation of a comprehensive set of evidence about beliefs for a particular domain is impractical in many cases. Generally, domain knowledge can be used to automatically create evidence for or against a set of beliefs. This paper develops a quantitative model based on support logic for determining the interestingness of discovered patterns. For Web Usage Mining, there are three types of domain information available; usage, co...

Categorizing visitors based on their interactions with a website is a key problem in web usage mining. The clickstreams generated by various users often follow distinct patterns, the knowledge of which may help in providing customized content. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective algorithm for clustering webusers based on a function of the longest common subsequence of their clickstreams that takes into account both the trajectory taken through a website and the time spent at each page. Results are presented on weblogs of www.sulekha.com to illustrate the techniques.

The clustering of the Web users based on their access patterns is studied. Access patterns of the Web users are extracted from Web servers' log files, and then organized into sessions which represent episodes of interaction between Web users and the Web server. Using attributedoriented induction, the sessions are then generalized according to the page hierarchy which organizes pages according to their generalities. The generalized sessions are finally clustered using a hierarchical clustering method. Our experiments on a large real data set show that the method is efficient and practical for Web mining applications. 1 Introduction With the rapid development of the World Wide Web (WWW), or the Web, many organizations now put their information on the Web and provide Web-based services such as on-line shopping, user feedback, technical support, etc. Web mining, the knowledge discovery in the Web, has become an important research area [2]. Research in Web Mining can be broadly classified...