Sessionization –A Vital Stage in Data Preprocessing of Web Usage Mining-A Survey

The World Wide Web has impacted on almost ever aspects of our lives in modern era. The Web has many unique characteristics and which make mining useful information and knowledge a challenging task. Web mining uses many data mining techniques but it is not an application of traditional data mining due to heterogeneity and unstructured nature of the data on Web. Web mining tasks can be categorized into three types: Web Structure Mining,. Web Content Mining and Web Usage Mining. The goal of Web Usage Mining is to capture, model and analyze the behavioral patterns and profiles of users interacting with a Web Site. Web Usage Mining consists of many stages but this paper focuses on first stage i.e data preprocessing. Data Preprocessing consists of data cleaning, page view identification, sessionization, data integration and data transformation. This paper focuses on most complex part of data preprocessing and that is Sessionization.This paper covers many important aspects of sessionization stage which are very useful for research scholars who are doing research work in Web Usage mining field.