A Survey on Preprocessing Techniques in Web Usage Mining

The World Wide Web (WWW) continues to grow at an overwhelming rate in both the sheer volume of traffic and the size and complexity of Web sites. Therefore, it becomes more and more necessary, but difficult to get useful information from Web data, in order to understand and better serve the needs of Web-based applications. As a result, the Web usage mining has become a hot research topic, which combines two of the prominent research areas comprising the data mining and the World Wide Web. Web usage mining consists of three phases, namely preprocessing, pattern discovery, and pattern analysis. For the survey, I focus on the first phase—data preprocessing, which is essential and must be performed prior to applying data mining algorithms to the data sources. An overview of data preprocessing techniques aiming at identifying unique users, user sessions and transactions is presented in this survey.