6,762 research outputs found
Computing the entropy of user navigation in the web
Navigation through the web, colloquially known as "surfing", is one of the main activities of users during web interaction. When users follow a navigation trail they often tend to get disoriented in terms of the goals of their original query and thus the discovery of typical user trails could be useful in providing navigation assistance. Herein, we give a theoretical underpinning of user navigation in terms of the entropy of an underlying Markov chain modelling the web topology. We present a novel method for online incremental computation of the entropy and a large deviation result regarding the length of a trail to realize the said entropy. We provide an error analysis for our estimation of the entropy in terms of the divergence between the empirical and actual probabilities. We then indicate applications of our algorithm in the area of web data mining. Finally, we present an extension of our technique to higher-order Markov chains by a suitable reduction of a higher-order Markov chain model to a first-order one
Web Site Personalization based on Link Analysis and Navigational Patterns
The continuous growth in the size and use of the World Wide Web imposes new methods of design and development of on-line information services. The need for predicting the users’ needs in order to improve the usability and user retention of a web site is more than evident and can be addressed by personalizing it. Recommendation algorithms aim at proposing “next” pages to users based on their current visit and the past users’ navigational patterns. In the vast majority of related algorithms, however, only the usage data are used to produce recommendations, disregarding the structural properties of the web graph. Thus important – in terms of PageRank authority score – pages may be underrated. In this work we present UPR, a PageRank-style algorithm which combines usage data and link analysis techniques for assigning probabilities to the web pages based on their importance in the web site’s navigational graph. We propose the application of a localized version of UPR (l-UPR) to personalized navigational sub-graphs for online web page ranking and recommendation. Moreover, we propose a hybrid probabilistic predictive model based on Markov models and link analysis for assigning prior probabilities in a hybrid probabilistic model. We prove, through experimentation, that this approach results in more objective and representative predictions than the ones produced from the pure usage-based approaches
Generating dynamic higher-order Markov models in web usage mining
Markov models have been widely used for modelling users’ web navigation behaviour. In previous work we have presented a dynamic clustering-based Markov model that accurately represents second-order transition probabilities given by a collection of navigation sessions. Herein, we propose a generalisation of the method that takes into account higher-order conditional probabilities. The method makes use of the state cloning concept together with a clustering technique to separate the navigation paths that reveal differences in the conditional probabilities. We report on experiments conducted with three real world data sets. The results show that some pages require a long history to understand the users choice of link, while others require only a short history. We also show that the number of additional states induced by the method can be controlled through a probability threshold parameter
PATH: Person Authentication using Trace Histories
In this paper, a solution to the problem of Active Authentication using trace
histories is addressed. Specifically, the task is to perform user verification
on mobile devices using historical location traces of the user as a function of
time. Considering the movement of a human as a Markovian motion, a modified
Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based solution is proposed. The proposed method,
namely the Marginally Smoothed HMM (MSHMM), utilizes the marginal probabilities
of location and timing information of the observations to smooth-out the
emission probabilities while training. Hence, it can efficiently handle
unforeseen observations during the test phase. The verification performance of
this method is compared to a sequence matching (SM) method , a Markov
Chain-based method (MC) and an HMM with basic Laplace Smoothing (HMM-lap).
Experimental results using the location information of the UMD Active
Authentication Dataset-02 (UMDAA02) and the GeoLife dataset are presented. The
proposed MSHMM method outperforms the compared methods in terms of equal error
rate (EER). Additionally, the effects of different parameters on the proposed
method are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. Best Paper award at IEEE UEMCON 201
Evaluating Variable Length Markov Chain Models for Analysis of User Web Navigation Sessions
Markov models have been widely used to represent and analyse user web
navigation data. In previous work we have proposed a method to dynamically
extend the order of a Markov chain model and a complimentary method for
assessing the predictive power of such a variable length Markov chain. Herein,
we review these two methods and propose a novel method for measuring the
ability of a variable length Markov model to summarise user web navigation
sessions up to a given length. While the summarisation ability of a model is
important to enable the identification of user navigation patterns, the ability
to make predictions is important in order to foresee the next link choice of a
user after following a given trail so as, for example, to personalise a web
site. We present an extensive experimental evaluation providing strong evidence
that prediction accuracy increases linearly with summarisation ability
Discovering Beaten Paths in Collaborative Ontology-Engineering Projects using Markov Chains
Biomedical taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies in the form of the
International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as a taxonomy or the National
Cancer Institute Thesaurus as an OWL-based ontology, play a critical role in
acquiring, representing and processing information about human health. With
increasing adoption and relevance, biomedical ontologies have also
significantly increased in size. For example, the 11th revision of the ICD,
which is currently under active development by the WHO contains nearly 50,000
classes representing a vast variety of different diseases and causes of death.
This evolution in terms of size was accompanied by an evolution in the way
ontologies are engineered. Because no single individual has the expertise to
develop such large-scale ontologies, ontology-engineering projects have evolved
from small-scale efforts involving just a few domain experts to large-scale
projects that require effective collaboration between dozens or even hundreds
of experts, practitioners and other stakeholders. Understanding how these
stakeholders collaborate will enable us to improve editing environments that
support such collaborations. We uncover how large ontology-engineering
projects, such as the ICD in its 11th revision, unfold by analyzing usage logs
of five different biomedical ontology-engineering projects of varying sizes and
scopes using Markov chains. We discover intriguing interaction patterns (e.g.,
which properties users subsequently change) that suggest that large
collaborative ontology-engineering projects are governed by a few general
principles that determine and drive development. From our analysis, we identify
commonalities and differences between different projects that have implications
for project managers, ontology editors, developers and contributors working on
collaborative ontology-engineering projects and tools in the biomedical domain.Comment: Published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatic
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
A fine grained heuristic to capture web navigation patterns
In previous work we have proposed a statistical model to capture the user behaviour when browsing the web. The user navigation information obtained from web logs is modelled as a hypertext probabilistic grammar (HPG) which
is within the class of regular probabilistic grammars. The set of highest probability strings generated by the grammar corresponds to the user preferred navigation trails. We have previously conducted experiments with a Breadth-First Search algorithm (BFS) to perform the exhaustive computation of all the strings with probability above a specified cut-point, which we call the rules. Although the algorithm’s running time varies linearly with the number of grammar states, it has the drawbacks of returning a large number of rules when the cut-point is small and a small set of very short rules when the cut-point is high.
In this work, we present a new heuristic that implements an iterative deepening search wherein the set of rules is incrementally augmented by first exploring trails with high probability. A stopping parameter is provided which measures the distance between the current rule-set and its corresponding maximal set obtained by the BFS algorithm. When the stopping parameter takes the value zero the heuristic corresponds to the BFS algorithm and as the parameter takes
values closer to one the number of rules obtained decreases accordingly.
Experiments were conducted with both real and synthetic data and the results show that for a given cut-point the number of rules induced increases smoothly with the decrease of the stopping criterion. Therefore, by setting the value of the stopping criterion the analyst can determine the number and quality of rules to be induced; the quality of a rule is measured by both its length and probability
Synthetic sequence generator for recommender systems - memory biased random walk on sequence multilayer network
Personalized recommender systems rely on each user's personal usage data in
the system, in order to assist in decision making. However, privacy policies
protecting users' rights prevent these highly personal data from being publicly
available to a wider researcher audience. In this work, we propose a memory
biased random walk model on multilayer sequence network, as a generator of
synthetic sequential data for recommender systems. We demonstrate the
applicability of the synthetic data in training recommender system models for
cases when privacy policies restrict clickstream publishing.Comment: The new updated version of the pape
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