A Survey on Web Usage Mining, Applications and Tools

World Wide Web is a vast collection of unstructured web documents like text, images, audio, video or Multimedia content.  As web is growing rapidly with millions of documents, mining the data from the web is a difficult task. To mine various patterns from the web is known as Web mining. Web mining is further classified as content mining, structure mining and web usage mining. Web usage mining is the data mining technique to mine the knowledge of usage of web data from World Wide Web. Web usage mining extracts useful information from various web logs i.e. users usage history. This is useful for better understanding and serve the people for better web applications. Web usage mining not only useful for the people who access the documents from the World Wide Web, but also it useful for many applications like e-commerce to do personalized marketing, e-services, the government agencies to classify threats and fight against terrorism, fraud detection, to identify criminal activities, the companies can establish better customer relationship and can improve their businesses by analyzing the people buying strategies etc. This paper is going to explain in detail about web usage mining and how it is helpful. Web Usage Mining has seen rapid increase towards research and people communities

Implementing Privacy Negotiations in E-Commerce

This paper examines how service providers may resolve the trade-off between their personalization efforts and users' individual privacy concerns. Finding that neither an optimized one-size-fits-all strategy, nor a market-driven specialization of providers or choices between different usage scenarios can solve the problem, we analyze how negotiation techniques can lead to efficient contracts and how they can be integrated into current technologies. The analysis includes the identification of relevant and negotiable privacy dimensions for different usage domains. Negotiations in multi-channel retailing are examined as a detailed example. Based on a formalization of the user's privacy revelation problem, we model the negotiation process as a Bayesian game where the service provider faces different types of users. Finally an extension to P3P is proposed that allows a simple expression and implementation of negotiation processes. Support for this extension has been integrated in the Mozilla browser.

Predictive Analytics with Sequence-based Clustering and Markov Chain

This research proposes a predictive modeling framework for Web user behavior with Web usage mining (WUM). The proposed predictive model utilizes sequence-based clustering, in order to group Web users into clusters with similar Web browsing behavior and Markov chains, in order to model Web users’ Web navigation behavior. This research will also provide a performance evaluation framework and suggest WUM systems that can improve advertisement placement and target marketing in a Web site

Customer profile classification using transactional data

Customer profiles are by definition made up of factual and transactional data. It is often the case that due to reasons such as high cost of data acquisition and/or protection, only the transactional data are available for data mining operations. Transactional data, however, tend to be highly sparse and skewed due to a large proportion of customers engaging in very few transactions. This can result in a bias in the prediction accuracy of classifiers built using them towards the larger proportion of customers with fewer transactions. This paper investigates an approach for accurately and confidently grouping and classifying customers in bins on the basis of the number of their transactions. The experiments we conducted on a highly sparse and skewed real-world transactional data show that our proposed approach can be used to identify a critical point at which customer profiles can be more confidently distinguished

A Utility-Theoretic Approach to Privacy in Online Services

Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by introducing methods to personalize services based on special knowledge about users and their context. For example, a user's demographics, location, and past search and browsing may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access by services to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information, in a standing or on-demand manner, in return for expected enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can find a provably near-optimal optimization of the utility-privacy tradeoff in an efficient manner. We evaluate our methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess users’ preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoples’ willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using a relatively small amount of information about users