Abstract: Web mining is a very hot research topic which combines two of the activated research areas: Data Mining and World Wide Web. The Web mining research relates to several research communities such as Database, Information Retrieval and Artificial Intelligence. Although there exists quite some confusion about the Web mining, the most recognized approach is to categorize Web mining into three areas: Web content mining, Web structure mining, and Web usage mining. Web content mining focuses on the discovery/retrieval of the useful information from the Web contents/data/documents, while the Web structure mining emphasizes to the discovery of how to model the underlying link structures of the Web. The distinction between these two categories isn't a very clear sometimes. Web usage mining is relative independent, but not isolated, category, which mainly describes the techniques that discover the user's usage pattern and try to predict the user's behaviors. This paper is a survey based on the recently published research papers. Besides providing an overall view of Web mining, this paper will focus on Web usage mining. Generally speaking, Web usage mining consists of three phases: Pre-processing, Pattern discovery and Pattern analysis. A detailed description will be given for each part of them, however, special attention will be paid to the user navigation patterns discovery and analysis. The user privacy is another important issue in this paper. An example of a prototypical Web usage mining system, WebSIFT, will be introduced to make it easier to understand the methodology of how to apply data mining techniques to large Web data repositories in order to extract usage patterns. Finally, along with some other interested research issues, a brief overview of the current research work in the area of Web usage mining is included.
Title: WEB MINING AN APPLICATION OF DATA MINING
Author: Sumit Dalal, Sumit Kumar, Vivek Dixit
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology Research
ISSN 2348-120X (online), ISSN 2348-1196 (print)
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