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Maximal paths recipe for constructing Web user sessions

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Abstract

This paper introduces a new method for the session construction problem, which is the first main step of the Web usage mining process. The proposed method defines user sessions as a set of navigation paths in the Web graph and produces a complete set of all possible maximal paths. Our new method is capable of generating navigation paths which cannot be extracted by using previous greedy approaches. Through experiments performed on real data, it is shown that when our new technique is used, it outperforms previous approaches in Web usage mining applications such as next-page prediction. Our analysis on Web user sessions exposes an important observation: Web users sessions contain navigation graphs that has small number of nodes where users branch out their navigation into multiple paths.

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Code Availability

The source code and the datasets are available at the following links:

– https://github.com/MBayir/CSRA

– https://github.com/MBayir/CSRA-Data

Notes

  1. The subsequence relation is equivalent to substring relation in this context.

  2. ⊔ operation stands for sequence concatenation which is same as string concatenation operator.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Arzu Bayir for the proofreading of the paper and reviewing format of the figures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Corporation Redmond, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA

    Murat Ali Bayir

  2. Middle East Technical University Ankara, Ankara, 06530, Turkey

    Ismail Hakki Toroslu

Authors
  1. Murat Ali Bayir
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  2. Ismail Hakki Toroslu
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Correspondence to Murat Ali Bayir.

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The work was done during the time period when author was employed at Microsoft. The author is currently with Meta Platforms Inc.

This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Computational Aspects of Network Science

Guest Editors: Apostolos N. Papadopoulos and Richard Chbeir

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Bayir, M.A., Toroslu, I.H. Maximal paths recipe for constructing Web user sessions. World Wide Web 25, 2455–2485 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-022-01024-3

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