Incremental and interactive mining of web traversal patterns

Web mining involves the application of data mining techniques to large amounts of web-related data in order to improve web services. Web traversal pattern mining involves discovering users’ access patterns from web server access logs. This information can provide navigation suggestions for web users indicating appropriate actions that can be taken. However, web logs keep growing continuously, and some web logs may become out of date over time. The users’ behaviors may change as web logs are updated, or when the web site structure is changed. Additionally, it can be difficult to determine a perfect minimum support threshold during the data mining process to find interesting rules. Accordingly, we must constantly adjust the minimum support threshold until satisfactory data mining results can be found.The essence of incremental data mining and interactive data mining is the ability to use previous mining results in order to reduce unnecessary processes when web logs or web site structures are updated, or when the minimum support is changed. In this paper, we propose efficient incremental and interactive data mining algorithms to discover web traversal patterns that match users’ requirements. The experimental results show that our algorithms are more efficient than other comparable approaches.