Chapter 12: Web Usage

Mining
- An introduction
Chapter written by Bamshad Mobasher

Many slides are from a tutorial given by

B. Berendt, B. Mobasher, M. Spiliopoulou
Introduction
 Web usage mining: automatic discovery of
patterns in clickstreams and associated data
collected or generated as a result of user
interactions with one or more Web sites.
 Goal: analyze the behavioral patterns and
profiles of users interacting with a Web site.
 The discovered patterns are usually
represented as collections of pages, objects,
or resources that are frequently accessed by
groups of users with common interests.
Introduction
 Data in Web Usage Mining:
 Web server logs
 Site contents
 Data about the visitors, gathered from external channels
 Further application data
 Not all these data are always available.
 When they are, they must be integrated.
 A large part of Web usage mining is about
processing usage/ clickstream data.
 After that various data mining algorithm can be applied.

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Web server logs
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Web usage mining process

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Data preparation

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Pre-processing of web usage data

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Data cleaning

 Data cleaning
 remove irrelevant references and fields in server
logs
 remove references due to spider navigation
 remove erroneous references
 add missing references due to caching (done after
sessionization)

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Identify sessions (sessionization)

 In Web usage analysis, these data are the

sessions of the site visitors: the activities
performed by a user from the moment she
enters the site until the moment she leaves it.
 Difficult to obtain reliable usage data due to
proxy servers and anonymizers, dynamic IP
addresses, missing references due to
caching, and the inability of servers to
distinguish among different visits.

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Sessionization strategies

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Sessionization heuristics

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Sessionization example

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User identification

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User identification: an example

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Pageview

 A pageview is an aggregate representation of

a collection of Web objects contributing to the
display on a user’s browser resulting from a
single user action (such as a click-through).
 Conceptually, each pageview can be viewed
as a collection of Web objects or resources
representing a specific “user event,” e.g.,
reading an article, viewing a product page, or
adding a product to the shopping cart.

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Path completion
 Client- or proxy-side caching can often result
in missing access references to those pages
or objects that have been cached.
 For instance,
 if a user returns to a page A during the same
session, the second access to A will likely result in
viewing the previously downloaded version of A
that was cached on the client-side, and therefore,
no request is made to the server.
 This results in the second reference to A not being
recorded on the server logs.
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Missing references due to caching

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Path completion
 The problem of inferring missing user
references due to caching.
 Effective path completion requires extensive
knowledge of the link structure within the site
 Referrer information in server logs can also
be used in disambiguating the inferred paths.
 Problem gets much more complicated in
frame-based sites.

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Integrating with e-commerce events
 Either product oriented or visit oriented
 Used to track and analyze conversion of
browsers to buyers.
 Major difficulty for E-commerce events is defining
and implementing the events for a site, however,
in contrast to clickstream data, getting reliable
preprocessed data is not a problem.
 Another major challenge is the successful
integration with clickstream data

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Product-Oriented Events

 Product View
 Occurs every time a product is displayed on a
page view
 Typical Types: Image, Link, Text
 Product Click-through
 Occurs every time a user “clicks” on a product to
get more information

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Product-Oriented Events

 Shopping Cart Changes

 Shopping Cart Add or Remove
 Shopping Cart Change - quantity or other feature
(e.g. size) is changed
 Product Buy or Bid
 Separate buy event occurs for each product in the
shopping cart
 Auction sites can track bid events in addition to
the product purchases

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Web usage mining process

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Integration with page content

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Integration with link structure

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E-commerce data analysis

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Session analysis

 Simplest form of analysis: examine individual

or groups of server sessions and e-
commerce data.
 Advantages:
 Gain insight into typical customer behaviors.
 Trace specific problems with the site.
 Drawbacks:
 LOTS of data.
 Difficult to generalize.
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Session analysis: aggregate reports

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OLAP

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Data mining

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Data mining (cont.)

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Some usage mining applications

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Personalization application

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Standard approaches

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Summary
 Web usage mining has emerged as the essential
tool for realizing more personalized, user-friendly
and business-optimal Web services.
 The key is to use the user-clickstream data for
many mining purposes.
 Traditionally, Web usage mining is used by e-
commerce sites to organize their sites and to
increase profits.
 It is now also used by search engines to improve
search quality and to evaluate search results, etc,
and by many other applications.
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