Comparing Clustering Algorithms for the Identification of Similar Pages in Web Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze some widely employed clustering algorithms to identify duplicated or cloned pages in web applications. Indeed, we consider an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm, a divisive clustering algorithm, k-means partitional clustering algorithm, and a partitional competitive clustering algorithm, namely Winner Takes All (WTA). All the clustering algorithms take as input a matrix of the distances between the structures of the web pages. The distance of two pages is computed applying the Levenshtein edit distance to the strings that encode the sequences of HTML tags of the web pages.KeywordsClone detectionclustering algorithmsreverse engineering