A Fuzzy Clustering Based Approach for Mining Usage Profiles from Web Log Data

The World Wide Web continues to grow at an amazing rate in both the size and complexity of Web sites and is well on its way to being the main reservoir of information and data. Due to this increase in growth and complexity of WWW, web site publishers are facing increasing difficulty in attracting and retaining users. To design popular and attractive websites publishers must understand their users needs. Therefore analyzing users behaviour is an important part of web page design. Web Usage Mining (WUM) is the application of data mining techniques to web usage log repositories in order to discover the usage patterns that can be used to analyze the users navigational behavior. WUM contains three main steps: preprocessing, knowledge extraction and results analysis. The goal of the preprocessing stage in Web usage mining is to transform the raw web log data into a set of user profiles. Each such profile captures a sequence or a set of URLs representing a user session.