Prediction of users webpage access behaviour using association rule mining

Abstract

Web Usage mining is a technique used to identify the user needs from the web log. Discovering hidden patterns from the logs is an upcoming research area. Association rules play an important role in many web mining applications to detect interesting patterns. However, it generates enormous rules that cause researchers to spend ample time and expertise to discover the really interesting ones. This paper works on the server logs from the MSNBC dataset for the month of September 1999. This research aims at predicting the probable subsequent page in the usage of web pages listed in this data based on their navigating behaviour by using Apriori prefix tree (PT) algorithm. The generated rules were ranked based on the support, confidence and lift evaluation measures. The final predictions revealed that the interestingness of pages mainly depended on the support and lift measure whereas confidence assumed a uniform value among all the pages. It proved that the system guaranteed 100% confidence with the support of 1.3E −05. It revealed that the pages such as Front page, On-air, News, Sports and BBS attracted more interested subsequent users compared to Travel, MSN-News and MSN-Sports which were of less interest.