Extraction of Web Navigation Patterns by means of Sequential Pattern Mining

Abstract

The world wide web has become a massive source of information as well as means of online business over the last many years. Business organizational websites serve as communication link between customers and business organizations for the e-business. Ebusiness organizations pursuit effective ways of marketing to fulfill their customers’ expectations. Thus, e-business organizations need to identify and evaluate the interests of their potential customers for promoting and increasing their business. Intelligent use of web mining techniques helps them to achieve their targeted goals such as assessing priorities and preferences of their customers. This study presents an approach to identify most frequent web navigational patterns from web logs. These patterns, obtained using well-established data mining disciplines: sequential pattern mining and clustering, help in understanding navigational behavior of the web users. The detected patterns may be used for creating dynamic websites, adverting purpose, user profiles, present and future probability, relationship between behavior and website usability.