Web Usage Mining: Discovery Of Mined Data Patterns and their Applications

Web Usage Mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover interesting usage patterns from Web data, in order to understand and better serve the needs of Web-based applications. Usage data relates with the identity or origin of Web users along with their browsing behavior at a Web site. Web usage mining itself can be classified further depending on the kind of usage data considered. They are web server data, application server data and application level data. Web server data correspond to the user level logs that are collected at Web server. Some of the typical data collected at a Web server include IP addresses, page references, and access time as well as pattern of the users and is the main input to the present research. Web usage mining consists of three phases, namely preprocessing, pattern discovery, and pattern analysis. This paper describes each of these phases in detail and the current applications of the technique.