The use of the Internet as a channel for communication and commerce makes available massive access logs. The large amount of data in these logs provides significant opportunity to apply empirical methods of analysis to understand the needs of the visitors to a web site and to optimize the site and the recommendations it makes to the individual visitors. There are a number of choices that need to be made in the pre-processing of access logs (required because of proxy level and client level caching as well as other factors) as well as the representation of data and the empirical model used for mining. This manuscript reviews some of the popular methods of pre-processing, data representation and methods and algorithms for subsequent mining.
By: Ravi Kothari, Parul Mittal
Published in: RI03007 in 2003
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