Jaideep Srivastava

Web usage mining: discovery and applications of usage patterns from Web data

Web usage mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover usage patterns from Web data, in order to understand and better serve the needs of Web-based applications. Web usage mining consists of three phases, namely preprocessing, pattern discovery, and pattern analysis. This paper describes each of these phases in detail. Given its application potential, Web usage mining has seen a rapid increase in interest, from both the research and practice communities. This paper provides a detailed taxonomy of the work in this area, including research efforts as well as commercial offerings. An up-to-date survey of the existing work is also provided. Finally, a brief overview of the WebSIFT system as an example of a prototypical Web usage mining system is given.

Data Preparation for Mining World Wide Web Browsing Patterns

The World Wide Web (WWW) continues to grow at an astounding rate in both the sheer volume of traffic and the size and complexity of Web sites. The complexity of tasks such as Web site design, Web server design, and of simply navigating through a Web site have increased along with this growth. An important input to these design tasks is the analysis of how a Web site is being used. Usage analysis includes straightforward statistics, such as page access frequency, as well as more sophisticated forms of analysis, such as finding the common traversal paths through a Web site. Web Usage Mining is the application of data mining techniques to usage logs of large Web data repositories in order to produce results that can be used in the design tasks mentioned above. However, there are several preprocessing tasks that must be performed prior to applying data mining algorithms to the data collected from server logs. This paper presents several data preparation techniques in order to identify unique users and user sessions. Also, a method to divide user sessions into semantically meaningful transactions is defined and successfully tested against two other methods. Transactions identified by the proposed methods are used to discover association rules from real world data using the WEBMINER system [15].

Automatic personalization based on Web usage mining

The ease and speed with which business transactions can be carried out over the Web have been a key driving force in the rapid growth of electronic commerce. Business-to-business e-commerce is the focus of much attention today, mainly due to its huge volume. While there are certainly gains to be made in this arena, most of it is the implementation of much more efficient supply management, payments, etc. On the other hand, e-commerce activity that involves the end user is undergoing a significant revolution. The ability to track users’ browsing behavior down to individual mouse clicks has brought the vendor and end customer closer than ever before. It is now possible for a vendor to personalize his product message for individual customers at a massive scale, a phenomenon that is being referred to as mass customization.

Web mining: information and pattern discovery on the World Wide Web

Application of data mining techniques to the World Wide Web, referred to as Web mining, has been the focus of several recent research projects and papers. However, there is no established vocabulary, leading to confusion when comparing research efforts. The term Web mining has been used in two distinct ways. The first, called Web content mining in this paper, is the process of information discovery from sources across the World Wide Web. The second, called Web usage mining, is the process of mining for user browsing and access patterns. We define Web mining and present an overview of the various research issues, techniques, and development efforts. We briefly describe WEBMINER, a system for Web usage mining, and conclude the paper by listing research issues.

Selecting the right interestingness measure for association patterns

Many techniques for association rule mining and feature selection require a suitable metric to capture the dependencies among variables in a data set. For example, metrics such as support, confidence, lift, correlation, and collective strength are often used to determine the interestingness of association patterns. However, many such measures provide conflicting information about the interestingness of a pattern, and the best metric to use for a given application domain is rarely known. In this paper, we present an overview of various measures proposed in the statistics, machine learning and data mining literature. We describe several key properties one should examine in order to select the right measure for a given application domain. A comparative study of these properties is made using twenty one of the existing measures. We show that each measure has different properties which make them useful for some application domains, but not for others. We also present two scenarios in which most of the existing measures agree with each other, namely, support-based pruning and table standardization. Finally, we present an algorithm to select a small set of tables such that an expert can select a desirable measure by looking at just this small set of tables.

Event detection from time series data

In the past few years there has been increased interest in using data-mining techniques to extract interesting patterns from time series data generated by sensors monitoring temporally varying phenomenon. Most work has assumed that raw data is somehow processed to generate a sequence of events, which is then mined for interesting episodes. In some cases the rule for determining when a sensor reading should generate an event is well known. However, if the phenomenon is ill-understood, stating such a rule is difficult. Detection of events in such an environment is the focus of this paper. Consider a dynamic phenomenon whose behavior changes enough over time to be considered a qualitatively significant change. The problem we investigate is of identifying the time points at which the behavior change occurs. In the statistics literature this has been called the change-point detection problem. The standard approach has been to (a) upriori determine the number of change-points that are to be discovered, and (b) decide the function that will be used for curve fitting in the interval between successive change-points. In this paper we generalize along both these dimensions. We propose an iterative algorithm that fits a model to a time segment, and uses a likelihood criterion to determine if the segment should be partitioned further, i.e. if it contains a new changepoint. In this paper we present algorithms for both the batch and incremental versions of the problem, and evaluate their behavior with synthetic and real data. Finally, we present initial results comparing the change-points detected by the batch algorithm with those detected by people using visual inspection.

Selecting the right objective measure for association analysis

Objective measures such as support, confidence, interest factor, correlation, and entropy are often used to evaluate the interestingness of association patterns. However, in many situations, these measures may provide conflicting information about the interestingness of a pattern. Data mining practitioners also tend to apply an objective measure without realizing that there may be better alternatives available for their application. In this paper, we describe several key properties one should examine in order to select the right measure for a given application. A comparative study of these properties is made using twenty-one measures that were originally developed in diverse fields such as statistics, social science, machine learning, and data mining. We show that depending on its properties, each measure is useful for some application, but not for others. We also demonstrate two scenarios in which many existing measures become consistent with each other, namely, when support-based pruning and a technique known as table standardization are applied. Finally, we present an algorithm for selecting a small set of patterns such that domain experts can find a measure that best fits their requirements by ranking this small set of patterns.

Creating adaptive Web sites through usage-based clustering of URLs

We describe an approach to usage based Web personalization taking into account both the offline tasks related to the mining of usage data, and the online process of automatic Web page customization based on the mined knowledge. Specifically, we propose an effective technique for capturing common user profiles based on association rule discovery and usage based clustering. We also propose techniques for combining this knowledge with the current status of an ongoing Web activity to perform real time personalization. Finally, we provide an experimental evaluation of the proposed techniques using real Web usage data.

Adaptive binary splitting for efficient RFID tag anti-collision

Tag collision arbitration for passive RFID tags is a significant issue for fast tag identification. This letter presents a novel tag anti-collision scheme called adaptive binary splitting (ABS). For reducing collisions, ABS assigns distinct timeslots to tags by using information obtained from the last identification process. Our performance evaluation shows that ABS outperforms other tree based tag anti-collision protocols.

Tag-Splitting: Adaptive Collision Arbitration Protocols for RFID Tag Identification

Tag identification is an important tool in RFID systems with applications for monitoring and tracking. A RFID reader recognizes tags through communication over a shared wireless channel. When multiple tags transmit their IDs simultaneously, the tag-to-reader signals collide and this collision disturbs a readers identification process. Therefore, tag collision arbitration for passive tags is a significant issue for fast identification. This paper presents two adaptive tag anticollision protocols: an Adaptive Query Splitting protocol (AQS), which is an improvement on the query tree protocol, and an Adaptive Binary Splitting protocol (ABS), which is based on the binary tree protocol and is a de facto standard for RFID anticollision protocols. To reduce collisions and identify tags efficiently, adaptive tag anticollision protocols use information obtained from the last process of tag identification. Our performance evaluation shows that AQS and ABS outperform other tree-based tag anticollision protocols.