Discovery of Web Usage Profiles Using Various Clustering Techniques

The explosive growth of World Wide Web (WWW) has necessitated the development of Web personalization systems in order to understand the user preferences to dynamically serve customized content to individual users. To reveal information about user preferences from Web usage data, Web Usage Mining (WUM) techniques are extensively being applied to the Web log data. Clustering techniques are widely used in WUM to capture similar interests and trends among users accessing a Web site. Clustering aims to divide a data set into groups or clusters where inter-cluster similarities are minimized while the intra cluster similarities are maximized. This paper reviews four of the popularly used clustering techniques: k-Means, k-Medoids, Leader and DBSCAN. These techniques are implemented and tested against the Web user navigational data. Performance and validity results of each technique are presented and compared. (Abstract) Keywords-component; web usage mining; k-means clustering; kmedoids clustering; leader clustering; DBSCAN