Web Usage Mining with Web Logs

With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, the use of automated Web-mining techniques to discover useful and relevant information has become increasingly important. One challenging direction is Web usage mining, wherein one attempts to discover user navigation patterns of Web usage from Web access logs. Properly exploited, the information obtained from Web usage log can assist us to improve the design of a Web site, refine queries for effective Web search, and build personalized search engines. However, Web log data are usually large in size and extremely detailed, because they are likely to record every aspect of a user request to a Web server. It is thus of great importance to process the raw Web log data in an appropriate way, and identify the target information intelligently. In this chapter, we first briefly review the concept of Web Usage Mining and discuss its difference from classic Knowledge Discovery techniques, and then focus on exploiting Web log sessions, defined as a group of requests made by a single user for a single navigation purpose, in Web usage mining. We also compare some of the state-of-the-art techniques in identifying log sessions from Web servers, and present some popular Web mining techniques, including Association Rule Mining, Clustering, Classification, Collaborative Filtering, and Sequential Pattern Learning, that can be exploited on the Web log data for different research and application purposes.