Discovering temporal hidden contexts in web sessions for user trail prediction

In many web information systems such as e-shops and information portals, predictive modeling is used to understand user's intentions based on their browsing behaviour. User behavior is inherently sensitive to various hidden contexts. It has been shown in different experimental studies that exploitation of contextual information can help in improving prediction performance significantly. It is reasonable to assume that users may change their intents during one web session and that changes are influenced by some external factors such as switch in temporal context e.g. 'users want to find information about a specific product' and after a while 'they want to buy this product'. A web session can be represented as a sequence of user's actions where actions are ordered by time. The generation of a web session might be influenced by several hidden temporal contexts. Each session can be represented as a concatenation of independent segments, each of which is influenced by one corresponding context. We show how to learn how to apply different predictive models for each segment in this work. We define the problem of discovering temporal hidden contexts in such way that we optimize directly the accuracy of predictive models (e.g. users' trails prediction) during the process of context acquisition. Our empirical study on a real dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our method

Discovering temporal hidden contexts in web sessions for user trail prediction

In many web information systems such as e-shops and information portals, predictive modeling is used to understand user's intentions based on their browsing behaviour. User behavior is inherently sensitive to various hidden contexts. It has been shown in different experimental studies that exploitation of contextual information can help in improving prediction performance significantly. It is reasonable to assume that users may change their intents during one web session and that changes are influenced by some external factors such as switch in temporal context e.g. 'users want to find information about a specific product' and after a while 'they want to buy this product'. A web session can be represented as a sequence of user's actions where actions are ordered by time. The generation of a web session might be influenced by several hidden temporal contexts. Each session can be represented as a concatenation of independent segments, each of which is influenced by one corresponding context. We show how to learn how to apply different predictive models for each segment in this work. We define the problem of discovering temporal hidden contexts in such way that we optimize directly the accuracy of predictive models (e.g. users' trails prediction) during the process of context acquisition. Our empirical study on a real dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our method

Predicting current user intent with contextual Markov models

In many web information systems like e-shops and information portals predictive modeling is used to understand user intentions based on their browsing behavior. User behavior is inherently sensitive to various contexts. Identifying such relevant contexts can help to improve the prediction performance. In this work, we propose a formal approach in which the context discovery process is defined as an optimization problem. For simplicity we assume a concrete yet generic scenario in which context is considered to be a secondary label of an instance that is either known from the available contextual attribute (e.g. user location) or can be induced from the training data (e.g. novice vs. expert user). In an ideal case, the objective function of the optimization problem has an analytical form enabling us to design a context discovery algorithm solving the optimization problem directly. An example with Markov models, a typical approach for modeling user browsing behavior, shows that the derived analytical form of the optimization problem provides us with useful mathematical insights of the problem. Experiments with a real-world use-case show that we can discover useful contexts allowing us to significantly improve the prediction of user intentions with contextual Markov models