Building and Exploiting Ad Hoc Concept Hierarchies for Web Log Analysis

Web usage mining aims at the discovery of interesting usage patterns from Web server log files. “Interestingness” relates to the business goals of the site owner. However, business goals refer to business objects rather than the page hits and script invocations recorded by the site server. Hence, Web usage analysis requires a preparatory mechanism that incorporates the business goals, the concepts reflecting them and the expert’s background knowledge on them into the mining process. To this purpose, we present a methodology and a mechanism for the establishment and exploitation of application-oriented concept hierarchies in Web usage analysis. We demonstrate our approach on a real data set and show how it can substantially improve both the search for interesting patterns by the mining algorithm and the interpretation of the mining results by the analyst.