Multidimensional Scaling as Visualization Tool of Web Sequence Rules

Web Mining can be defined as the application of Data mining processes to Web data. In the field of Web Mining, we distinguish among

Web Content Mining

,

Web Structure Mining

and

Web Usage Mining

. Web Content Mining is the Web Mining process which analyze various aspects related to the contents of a web site such as text, banners, graphics etc. Web Structure Mining is the branch of Web Mining that analyze the structure of the Net (or a sub-part) in terms of connection among the web pages and their linkage design. Finally, Web Usage Mining goal is to understand the usage custom behaviors of web sites users. Within the context of Web Usage Mining,

pattern discovery

and

pattern analysis

allow to

profile

users and their preferences. The sequence rules are association rules ordered in time. Given a data set coming from a web site which is characterized by a sequence of visits, the proposal is to understand the differences among browsing sections through a Multidimensional Scaling solution, and then obtain a graphical tool which allows to visualize in a new way the sequence rules. The resulting application is half way between Web Usage Mining and Web Structure Mining.