Mining WWW access sequence by matrix clustering

Abstract

Sequence pattern mining is one of the most important methods for mining WWW access log. The Apriori algorithm is well known as a typical algorithm for sequence pattern mining. However, it suffers from inherent difficulties in finding long sequential patterns and in extracting interesting patterns among a huge amount of results. This article proposes a new method for finding generalized sequence pattern by matrix clustering. This method decomposes a sequence into a set of sequence elements, each of which corresponds to an ordered pair of items. Then matrix clustering is applied to extract a cluster of similar sequences. The resulting sequence elements are composed into a generalized sequence. Our method is evaluated with practical WWW access log, which shows that it is practically useful in finding long sequences and in presenting the generalized sequence in a graph. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.