DECT: Distributed evolving context tree for understanding user behavior pattern evolution

Abstract

Internet user behavior models characterize user browsing dynamics or the transitions among web pages. The models help Internet companies improve their services by accurately targeting customers and providing them the information they want. For instance, specific web pages can be customized and prefetched for individuals based on sequences of web pages they have visited. Existing user behavior models abstracted as time-homogeneous Markov models cannot efficiently model user behavior variation through time. This demo presents DECT, a scalable time-variant variable-order Markov model. DECT digests terabytes of user session data and yields user behavior patterns through time. We realize DECT using Apache Spark and deploy it on top of Yahoo infrastructure. We demonstrate the benefits of DECT with anomaly detection and ad click rate prediction applications. DECT enables the detection of higher-order path anomalies and provides deep insights into ad click rates with respect to user visiting paths.