A new reactive method for processing web usage data

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2006

Öğrenci: MURAT ALİ BAYIR

Danışman: İSMAİL HAKKI TOROSLU

Özet:

In this thesis, a new reactive session reconstruction method 'Smart-SRA' is introduced. Web usage mining is a type of web mining, which exploits data mining techniques to discover valuable information from navigations of Web users. As in classical data mining, data processing and pattern discovery are the main issues in web usage mining. The first phase of the web usage mining is the data processing phase including session reconstruction. Session reconstruction is the most important task of web usage mining since it directly affects the quality of the extracted frequent patterns at the final step, significantly. Session reconstruction methods can be classified into two categories, namely 'reactive' and 'proactive' with respect to the data source and the data processing time. If the user requests are processed after the server handles them, this technique is called as ‘reactive’, while in ‘proactive’ strategies this processing occurs during the interactive browsing of the web site. Smart-SRA is a reactive session reconstruction techique, which uses web log data and the site topology. In order to compare Smart-SRA with previous reactive methods, a web agent simulator has been developed. Our agent simulator models behavior of web users and generates web user navigations as well as the log data kept by the web server. In this way, the actual user sessions will be known and the successes of different techniques can be compared. In this thesis, it is shown that the sessions generated by Smart-SRA are more accurate than the sessions constructed by previous heuristics.