Bot or not? a case study on bot recognition from web session logs

Abstract

This work reports on a study of web usage logs to verify whether it is possible to achieve good recognition rates in the task of distinguishing between human users and automated bots using computational intelligence techniques. Two problem statements are given, offline (for completed sessions) and on-line (for sequences of individual HTTP requests). The former is solved with several standard computational intelligence tools. For the second, a learning version of Wald’s sequential probability ratio test is used.