Mining top-k maximal reference sequences from streaming web click-sequences with a damped sliding window

Online mining of path traversal patterns from continuous Web click streams is one of the challenging research problems of Web usage mining. Most of previous works focus on mining path traversal patterns over the entire history of Web click streams. Mining the recent changes of Web click streams can provide valuable information for the analysis of the Web click streams. In this paper, we propose a new, online mining algorithm, called Top-DSW (top-k path traversal patterns of stream Damped Sliding Window), to discover the set of top-k path traversal patterns from streaming maximal forward references, where k is the desired number of path traversal patterns to be mined. An effective summary data structure, called TKP-DSW-list (a list of top-k path traversal patterns of stream Damped Sliding Windows) is developed to maintain the essential information about the top-k path traversal patterns from the maximal forward references within a stream damped sliding window. An effective space pruning mechanism, called TKR-list-maintain, is developed to control the memory requirement of the TKP-DSW-list. Experimental studies show that the proposed Top-DSW algorithm is an efficient, single-pass algorithm for online mining of the set of top-k path traversal patterns over stream damped sliding windows.