Web Usage Mining (WUM) includes all the Data Mining techniques used to analyze the behavior of a Web site‘s users (Cooley, Mobasher & Srivastava, 1999, Spiliopoulou, Faulstich & Winkler, 1999, Mobasher, Dai, Luo & Nakagawa, 2002). Based mainly on the data stored into the access log files, these methods allow the discovery of frequent behaviors. In particular, the extraction of sequential patterns (Agrawal, & Srikant, 1995) is well suited to the context of Web logs analysis, given the chronological nature of their records. On a Web portal, one could discover for example that “25% of the users navigated on the site in a particular order, by consulting first the homepage then the page with an article about the bird flu, then the Dow Jones index evolution to finally return on the homepage before consulting their personal e-mail as a subscriber”. In theory, this analysis allows us to find frequent behaviors rather easily. However, reality shows that the diversity of the Web pages and behaviors makes this approach delicate. Indeed, it is often necessary to set minimum thresholds of frequency (i.e. minimum support) of about 1% or 2% before revealing these behaviors. Such low supports combined with significant characteristics of access log files (e.g. huge number of records) are generally the cause of failures or limitations for the existent techniques employed in Web usage analysis. A solution for this problem consists in clustering the pages by topic, in the form of a taxonomy for example, in order to obtain a more general behavior. Considering again the previous example, one could have obtained: “70% of the users navigate on the Web site in a particular order, while consulting the home page then a page of news, then a page on financial indexes, then return on the homepage before consulting a service of communication offered by the Web portal”. A page on the financial indexes can relate to the Dow Jones as well as the FTSE 100 or the NIKKEI (and in a similar way: the e-mail or the chat are services of communication, the bird flu belongs to the news section, etc.). Moreover, the fact of grouping these pages under the “financial indexes” term has a direct impact by increasing the support of such behaviors and thus their readability, their relevance and significance. The drawback of using a taxonomy comes from the time and energy necessary to its definition and maintenance. In this chapter, we propose solutions to facilitate (or guide as much as possible) the automatic creation of this taxonomy allowing a WUM process to return more effective and relevant results. These solutions include a prior clustering of the pages depending on the way they are reached by the users. We will show the relevance of our approach in terms of efficiency and effectiveness when extracting the results.
Usage analysis in the web-based distance learning environment in a foreign language education: Case study
