Using retrieval measures to assess similarity in mining dynamic web clickstreams

• Authors: Olfa Nasraoui;Cesar Cardona;Carlos Rojas
• Venue: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery in data mining
• Year: 2005

While scalable data mining methods are expected to cope with massive Web data, coping with evolving trends in noisy data in a continuous fashion, and without any unnecessary stoppages and reconfigurations is still an open challenge. This dynamic and single pass setting can be cast within the framework of mining evolving data streams. In this paper, we explore the task of mining mass user profiles by discovering evolving Web session clusters in a single pass with a recently proposed scalable immune based clustering approach (TECNO-STREAMS), and study the effect of the choice of different similarity measures on the mining process and on the interpretation of the mined patterns. We propose a simple similarity measure that has the advantage of explicitly coupling the precision and coverage criteria to the early learning stages, and furthermore requiring that the affinity of the data to the learned profiles or summaries be defined by the minimum of their coverage or precision, hence requiring that the learned profiles are simultaneously precise and complete, with no compromises.In our experiments, we study the task of mining evolving user profiles from Web clickstream data (web usage mining) in a single pass, and under different trend sequencing scenarios, showing that compared oto the cosine similarity measure, the proposed similarity measure explicitly based on precision and coverage allows the discovery of more correct profiles at the same precision or recall quality levels.