A Novel Semantically-Time-Referrer based Approach of Web Usage Mining for Improved Sessionization in Pre-Processing of Web Log

Web usage mining(WUM) , also known as Web Log Mining is the application of Data Mining techniques, which are applied on large volume of data to extract useful and interesting user behaviour patterns from web logs, in order to improve web based applications. This paper aims to improve the data discovery by mining the usage data from log files. In this paper the work is done in three phases. First and second phase0 which are data cleaning and user identification respectively are completed using traditional methods. The third phase, session identification is done using three different methods. The main focus of this paper is on sessionization of log file which is a critical step for extracting usage patterns. The proposed referrertime and Semantically-time-referrer methods overcome the limitations of traditional methods. The main advantage of preprocessing model presented in this paper over other methods is that it can process text or excel log file of any format. The experiments are performed on three different log files which indicate that the proposed semantically-time-referrer based heuristic approach achieves better results than the traditional time and Referrer-time based methods. The proposed methods are not complex to use. Web log file is collected from different servers and contains the public information of visitors. In addition, this paper also discusses different types of web log formats. Keywords—Web Usage Mining; User Identification; Session Identification; Semantics; Data Cleaning; Time Heuristics; Referrer Heuristics