Understanding User Behavior using Web Usage Mining

Web usage mining is about analyzing the user interactions with a web server based on resources like web logs, click streams and database transactions. It helps in discovering the browsing patterns of the user and in relating the pages visited by him. This knowledge can be of help in making business decisions, refining the web site design to derive personalized pages. Web usage mining uses the data mining and the incremental mining techniques to extract the user usage patterns and study the visiting characteristics of the user. Normally, the source for all this data is the web server log, which changes dynamically. Conventional data mining techniques were proposed to be inefficient, as they need to be re-executed every time the log changes which in turn requires multiple database scans.