Integrating E-Commerce and Data Mining: Architecture and Challenges

We show that the e-commerce domain can provide all the right ingredients for successful data mining and claim that it is a killer domain for data mining. We describe an integrated architecture, based on our expe-rience at Blue Martini Software, for supporting this integration. The architecture can dramatically reduce the pre-processing, cleaning, and data understanding effort often documented to take 80% of the time in knowledge discovery projects. We emphasize the need for data collection at the application server layer (not the web server) in order to support logging of data and metadata that is essential to the discovery process. We describe the data transformation bridges required from the transaction processing systems and customer event streams (e.g., clickstreams) to the data warehouse. We detail the mining workbench, which needs to provide multiple views of the data through reporting, data mining algorithms, visualization, and OLAP. We con-clude with a set of challenges.Comment: KDD workshop: WebKDD 200

Customer purchase behavior prediction in E-commerce: a conceptual framework and research agenda

Digital retailers are experiencing an increasing number of transactions coming from their consumers online, a consequence of the convenience in buying goods via E-commerce platforms. Such interactions compose complex behavioral patterns which can be analyzed through predictive analytics to enable businesses to understand consumer needs. In this abundance of big data and possible tools to analyze them, a systematic review of the literature is missing. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic literature review of recent research dealing with customer purchase prediction in the E-commerce context. The main contributions are a novel analytical framework and a research agenda in the field. The framework reveals three main tasks in this review, namely, the prediction of customer intents, buying sessions, and purchase decisions. Those are followed by their employed predictive methodologies and are analyzed from three perspectives. Finally, the research agenda provides major existing issues for further research in the field of purchase behavior prediction online

A Study of Customer Behaviour Through Web Mining

Web mining is the extraction of interesting and potentially useful patterns and hidden information from web documents and web activities by applying data mining technology. The most important challenge of electronic commerce (E-commerce) is to understand as much as possible the customers ’ wants, desires, and buying patterns to ensure competitiveness in the E-commerce era. Nowadays, any information related to consumer behavior has an important value in the highly competitive nature of the E-commerce market. Therefore, web mining can be used to find those obvious data that have potential value to reduce competition and simultaneously increase business profit. This paper aims to study the classification of web mining to extract customer behavior in E-commerce, investigate customer behavior through the techniques and processes of the web data mining used, explore the application of web mining in E-commerce, and increase profit

DISCOVERING KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURE IN THE WEB

Association Rule Mining is a widely used method for finding interesting relationships from large data sets. The challenge here is how to swiftly and accurately discover association rules from large data sets. To achieve this, this paper will (1) build a data warehouse system that simulates the secondary storage and represents a database by bit patterns, and (2) implement a new geometric algorithm to find association rules, called Maximal Simplex Algorithm. The data warehouse consists of very long bit columns. Each column is an item or an attribute value pair and a row represents a transaction or a tuple in a database. A bit value 1 in a row represents the transaction contain this item or the tuple contains this value. In this Maximal Simplex Algorithm, we interpret the set of bit columns as a set of independent vertices in a high dimension Euclidean space. The main idea is for each vertex, we find its star neighborhood, namely to find all simplexes that contains this vertex. An n-dimensional simplex is called n-simplex. An n-simplex represents the association rule of length n+1. Based on the experimental results, Maximal Simplex method improves the performance of association rule mining. And also it is possible to achieve parallel computing by using the data warehouse system

M-COMMERCE VS. E-COMMERCE: EXPLORING WEB SESSION BROWSING BEHAVIOR

With the growing popularity of mobile commerce (m-commerce), it becomes vital for both researchers and practitioners to understand m-commerce usage behavior. \ \ In this study, we investigate browsing behavior patterns based on the analysis of clickstream data that is recorded in server-side log files. We compare consumers\u27 browsing behaviors in the m-commerce channel against the traditional e-commerce channel. For the comparison, we offer an integrative web usage mining approach, combining visualization graphs, association rules and classification models to analyze the Web server log files of a large Internet retailer in Israel, who introduced m-commerce to its existing e-commerce offerings. \ \ The analysis is expected to reveal typical m-commerce and e-commerce browsing behavior, in terms of session timing and intensity of use and in terms of session navigation patterns. The obtained results will contribute to the emerging research area of m-commerce and can be also used to guide future development of mobile websites and increase their effectiveness. Our preliminary findings are promising. They reveal that browsing behaviors in m-commerce and e-commerce are different

Log-Based Session Profiling and Online Behavioral Prediction in E-Commerce Websites

Improvements to customer experience give companies a competitive advantage, as understanding customers' behaviors allows e-commerce companies to enhance their marketing strategies by means of recommendation techniques and the customization of products and services. This is not a simple task, and it becomes more difficult when working with anonymous sessions since no historical information of the user can be applied. In this article, analysis and clustering of the clickstreams of past anonymous sessions are used to synthesize a prediction model based on a neural network. The model allows for prediction of a user's profile after a few clicks of an online anonymous session. This information can be used by the e-commerce's decision system to generate online recommendations and better adapt the offered services to the customer's profile

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

Weak signal identification with semantic web mining

We investigate an automated identification of weak signals according to Ansoff to improve strategic planning and technological forecasting. Literature shows that weak signals can be found in the organization's environment and that they appear in different contexts. We use internet information to represent organization's environment and we select these websites that are related to a given hypothesis. In contrast to related research, a methodology is provided that uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) for the identification of weak signals. This improves existing knowledge based approaches because LSI considers the aspects of meaning and thus, it is able to identify similar textual patterns in different contexts. A new weak signal maximization approach is introduced that replaces the commonly used prediction modeling approach in LSI. It enables to calculate the largest number of relevant weak signals represented by singular value decomposition (SVD) dimensions. A case study identifies and analyses weak signals to predict trends in the field of on-site medical oxygen production. This supports the planning of research and development (R&D) for a medical oxygen supplier. As a result, it is shown that the proposed methodology enables organizations to identify weak signals from the internet for a given hypothesis. This helps strategic planners to react ahead of time

A Review of Data-driven Robotic Process Automation Exploiting Process Mining

Purpose: Process mining aims to construct, from event logs, process maps that can help discover, automate, improve, and monitor organizational processes. Robotic process automation (RPA) uses software robots to perform some tasks usually executed by humans. It is usually difficult to determine what processes and steps to automate, especially with RPA. Process mining is seen as one way to address such difficulty. This paper aims to assess the applicability of process mining algorithms in accelerating and improving the implementation of RPA, along with the challenges encountered throughout project lifecycles. Methodology: A systematic literature review was conducted to examine the approaches where process mining techniques were used to understand the as-is processes that can be automated with software robots. Eight databases were used to identify papers on this topic. Findings: A total of 19 papers, all published since 2018, were selected from 158 unique candidate papers and then analyzed. There is an increase in the number of publications in this domain. Originality: The literature currently lacks a systematic review that covers the intersection of process mining and robotic process automation. The literature mainly focuses on the methods to record the events that occur at the level of user interactions with the application, and on the preprocessing methods that are needed to discover routines with the steps that can be automated. Several challenges are faced with preprocessing such event logs, and many lifecycle steps of automation project are weakly supported by existing approaches.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, 5 table