Rule Induction for Click-Stream Analysis: Set Covering and Compositional Approach

We present a set covering algorithm and a compositional algorithm to describe sequences of www pages visits in click-stream data. The set covering algorithm utilizes the approach of rule specialization like the well known CN2 algorithm, the compositional algorithm is based on our original KEX algorithm, however both algorithms deal with sequences of events (visited pages) instead of sets of attribute-value pairs. The learned rules can be used to predict next page to be viewed by a user or to describe the most typical paths of www pages visitors and the dependencies among the www pages. We have successfully used both algorithms on real data from an internet shop and we mined useful information from the data.