Analysis of Click Stream Patterns using Soft Biclustering Approaches

As websites increase in complexity, locating needed information becomes a difficult task. Such difficulty is often related to the websites’ design but also ineffective and inefficient navigation processes. Research in web mining addresses this problem by applying techniques from data mining and machine learning to web data and documents. In this study, the authors examine web usage mining, applying data mining techniques to web server logs. Web usage mining has gained much attention as a potential approach to fulfill the requirement of web personalization. In this paper, the authors propose K-means biclustering, rough biclustering and fuzzy biclustering approaches to disclose the duality between users and pages by grouping them in both dimensions simultaneously. The simultaneous clustering of users and pages discovers biclusters that correspond to groups of users that exhibit highly correlated ratings on groups of pages. The results indicate that the fuzzy C-means biclustering algorithm best and is able to detect partial matching of preferences. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1562-5.ch015