A latent usage approach for clustering web transaction and building user profile

Abstract

Web transaction data between web visitors and web functionalities usually convey users' task-oriented behavior patterns. Clustering web transactions, thus, may capture such informative knowledge, in turn, build user profiles, which are associated with different navigational patterns. For some advanced web applications, such as web recommendation or personalization, the aforementioned work is crucial to make web users get their preferred information accurately. On the other hand, the conventional web usage mining techniques for clustering web objects often perform clustering on usage data directly rather than take the underlying semantic relationships among the web objects into account. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) model is a commonly used approach for capturing semantic associations among co-occurrence observations.. In this paper, we propose a LSA-based approach for such purpose. We demonstrated usability and scalability of the proposed approach through performing experiments on two real world datasets. The experimental results have validated the method's effectiveness in comparison with some previous studies. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.