Browsing behaviour analysis using data mining

Abstract

Now-a-days most of our time is spent online using some form of digital technology such as search engines, news portals, or social media websites. Our online presence makes us engaged most of the time and leads us to become oblivious of our important work, resulting in a form of procrastination that decreases our productivity significantly. Some desktop and mobile applications have recently emerged to counter the problem by introducing various means of self-tracking to reduce the wasting of time and engage in productive activities. However, these systems suffer several shortcomings in terms of being static or providing a limited view of actions using one aspect only. To promote self-awareness that helps bring positive changes in individual's performance, there is a need to present the data in a more persuasive ways, bringing interaction to it and present the same data in different ways using both temporal and categorical dimensions. We describe a framework that collects and processes the browsing data and creates a user behavior model to extract valuable and interesting temporal and categorical patterns regarding user online behavior and interests. To discover the valuable behavior patterns from the individual's browsing data, different web usage mining techniques have been used. Finally, we demonstrate interactive visualizations for the analysis and monitoring of web browsing behavior patterns with the goal of providing the individual with detailed understanding of his/her behavior. We also present a small-scale study including university students, which proves the importance of our work.