WWW portal usage analysis using genetic algorithms

Abstract

The article proposes a new method suitable for advanced analysis of web portal visits. This is part of retrieving information and knowledge from web usage data (web usage mining). Such information is necessary in order to gain better insight into visitor’s needs and generally consumer behaviour. By le­ve­ra­ging this information a company can optimize the organization of its internet presentations and offer a better end-user experience. The proposed approach is using Grammatical evolution which is computational method based on genetic algorithms. Grammatical evolution is using a context-free grammar in order to generate the solution in arbitrary reusable form. This allows us to describe visitors’ behaviour in different manners depending on desired further processing. In this article we use description with a procedural programming language. Web server access log files are used as source data.The extraction of behaviour patterns can currently be solved using statistical analysis – specifically sequential analysis based methods. Our objective is to develop an alternative algorithm.The article further describes the basic algorithms of two-level grammatical evolution; this involves basic Grammatical Evolution and Differential Evolution, which forms the second phase of the computation. Grammatical evolution is used to generate the basic structure of the solution – in form of a part of application code. Differential evolution is used to find optimal parameters for this solution – the specific pages visited by a random visitor. The grammar used to conduct experiments is described along with explanations of the links to the actual implementation of the algorithm. Furthermore the fitness function is described and reasons which yield to its’ current shape. Finally the process of analyzing and filtering the raw input data is described as it is vital part in obtaining reasonable results.

Keywords

• genetic algorithms
• data mining
• behaviour patterns
• www portal