TOWARDS ESTABLISHING THE IMPORTANCE OF ORDERING INFORMATION FOR WEB SITE PERSONALIZATION Pradeep Kumar1 , Raju S.Bapi2 and P. Radha Krishna3 1

SETLabs, Infosys Technologies Limited, Bangalore, INDIA, Email: [email protected] 2 University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, INDIA, Email: [email protected] 3 IDRBT, Hyderabad, INDIA, Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT

With the growth in the number of Web users and necessity for making information available on the Web, the problem of Web personalization has become very critical and popular. Developers are trying to customize a web site to the needs of specific users with the help of knowledge acquired from user navigational behavior. Since user page visits are intrinsically sequential in nature, efficient clustering algorithms for sequential data is needed. In the current paper, we demonstrate the clustering task for sequence data (web page visits) in two ways namely, considering local ordering and global ordering. The main objective of this paper is to establish the importance of ordering information in personalizing the web sites. Partitioning Around Mediod (PAM) clustering algorithm is utilized for clustering task and sliding window technique is used for extracting local ordering information of the sequences. Global ordering information was captured using a similarity preserving function called sequence and set similarity measure (S 3 M ) that captures both the order of occurrence of page visits as well as the content of pages. The goodness of the clusters resulting from both the measures was computed using a cluster validation technique based on average levensthein distance. We provide recommendations for Web personalization based on the clusters obtained after extracting global ordering information from sequences of web page visits.

1

Introduction

The wide spread evolution of global information infrastructure, especially based on Internet and the immense popularity of web technology among people, have added to the number of consumers as well as disseminators of information. Until date, plenty of search engines are being developed, however, researchers are trying to build more efficient search engines. Web site developers and web mining researchers are trying to address the problem of average users in quickly finding what they are looking for from the vast and everincreasing global information network. One solution to meet the user requirements is to develop a system that personalizes the web space. Personalizing the web space means developing a strategy, which implicitly or explicitly captures the visitors information on a particular web site. With the help of this knowledge, the system should decide what information should be presented to the visitor and in what fashion. The log data obtained from various sources such as proxy server and Web server helps in personalizing web according to the interest and tastes of the user community. Personalized content enables organizations to form lasting and loyal relationships with customers by providing individualized information, offerings and services. PerThe current work is part of the Doctoral work of the first author under the guidance of second and third authors

sonalization can be effectively achieved by using Web mining approaches. The problem of web mining consists of automated analysis of web access logs in order to discover trends and regularities (patterns) in users’ behavior. The discovered patterns are usually utilized for improvement of web site organization and presentation. One of the most interesting web log mining methods is clustering of web users [1]. The problem of clustering of web users (or segmentation) is solved by using web access log files to partition a set of users into clusters such that users within a cluster are more similar to each other than users from different clusters. The discovered clusters can then help in on-the-fly transformation and presentation of the web site content. In particular, web pages can be automatically linked by artificial hyperlinks. The idea is to try to match an active user’s access pattern with one or more of the clusters discovered from the web log files. Pages in the matched clusters that have not been yet explored by the user may be presented as navigational hints for the user to follow subsequently. Since these web logs intrinsically captures sequentiality in nature the importance of order or sequential information should be explored. The main contribution of this paper is to establish the importance of order information in personalizing the web sites. In this paper, web logs have been clustered using two methods namely; extracting local ordering information and extracting global ordering information. We have tried to demonstrate that the quality of clusters formed after capturing the order information is better than without capturing the order information. Table 1 shows the various distance /similarity measures used in this paper. First four measures are used in local ordering experiment and fifth measure is used for global ordering information. The paper is organized as follows. Sections 2 and 3, present experiments related to the clustering of web pages using local and global ordering information respectively.

2 Clustering using local ordering information Clustering of sequences can be performed by considering the local order information embedded in sequences [6]. To extract the local ordering information an appropriate representation scheme for sequences is needed. The most popular scheme is to represent sequences as vectors in multidimensional space. Each dimension is equivalent to a distinct subsequence from the sequence collection. This distinct sequences capture the local ordering information. Once the local ordering information is captured it can be used in conjunction with any vector based distance/similarity measure. Fixed-size subsequence is called a window. This window is slided over the sequence to find unique subsequences of a fixed length over the whole sequence. Frequency of occurrences count of each subsequence is recorded. Frequencies of subsequences can be represented in the vectorial form and standard distance/similarity measure, thus incorporating

Table 1. Distance/Similarity Measure. X and Y are two sequences, |X| and |Y | computes the length of the sequences X and Y respectively, LLCS = Longest Common Subsequence Sl No. 1.

Distance/Similarity Measure

Formulae ·

Euclidean

n P

Application

Remark

Numerical Data

Most commonly used metric

clustering/ classification Categorical data clustering/ classification Document clustering/ classification

Special case of Minkowski metric for n =2 Measures commonly shared elements among sets. Independent of vector length. Invariant to rotation but not to linear transformations. Cosine measure weighted by binary measure of commonly shared elements among vectors. Linear weighted combination of Jaccard and Longest common subsequence

¸1/2 (Xs − Ys )2

s=1

2. 3.

4. 5.

Distance [2] Jaccard Similarity [3] Cosine Similarity [2] Binary Weighted Cosine Similarity [4] Sequence and Set Similarity [5]

|X∩Y | |X∪Y | X•Y |X||Y |

|Xb ∧Yb | |Xb ∨Yb |

p∗

×

LLCS(X,Y ) max(|X|,|Y |)

X•Y |X||Y |

+q∗

|X∩Y | |X∪Y |

Categorical data clustering/ classification Sequence Data classification and Clustering

local ordering information in conjunction to vector space representation. Once the whole sequence is encoded into frequency vector, the traditional Partitioning Around Mediod (PAM) clustering algorithm [7] with various distance/similarity measures is applied. The objective of the clustering methods is to discover significant groups present in a data set. In general, they should search for clusters whose members are close to each other (in other words, enforcing a high degree of similarity) and well separated. In order to evaluate the grouping, we used sum-of-squared error criterion in this work.

dicate the importance of sequence information in grouping sequence data. In the case of Jaccard similarity measure, lowest sum-of-squared error was recorded with respect to other distance/similarity measures for corresponding values of k (number of cluster value) and subsequence length. As Jaccard measure captures the content information the result indicates that the content information is also important. Also, Jaccard similarity measure requires less number of iterations to find the best combination of medoids in the P AM clustering algorithm. The results of Jaccard measure give us an intuition that the 2.1 Experimental results content information is also important while considering clustering of Experiments were conducted using PAM clustering algorithm with sequences. Euclidean distance, Jaccard similarity, Cosine similarity and Binary We observed that for the Euclidean distance measure the sum-ofWeighted Cosine (BWC) similarity measure [4]. Each distance/similarity squared error tends to increase with the increase in the subsequence measure was individually experimented with PAM clustering algolength. In contrast, for the other measures sum-of-squared error derithm on msnbc web log dataset. creases. In addition, for Euclidean measure the number of iterations We obtained msnbc web log data from the UCI dataset reposrequired is very high as compared to the other measures. itory [8] that consists of Internet Information Server (IIS) logs for msnbc.com and news-related portions of msn.com for the entire day Euclidean measure is sensitive to dimensionality of the input data. of September 28, 1999 (Pacific Standard Time). Each sequence in As the input dimensionality increases Euclidean measure also inthe dataset corresponds to page views of a user during that twentycreases due to the fact that there will be additional terms included four hour period. Each event in the sequence corresponds to a user’s in the computation of the distance. Since sum-of-squared error uses request for a page. Requests are not recorded at the finest level of the same distance measure in its computations, the residual error is detail but at the level of page categories as determined by the site more in the case of Euclidean measure. Whereas, the other meaadministrator. There are 17 page categories. As the average length sures used in this paper are not sensitive to the vector length and of the user session is 5.7, we used sequences of length 6 in our exhence the residual error during computation of sum-of-squared error perimentation. We randomly selected 5000 sequences from the preprocessed dataset is low. This might be a possible reason for the increasing value of sum of squared measure with increased dimensionality in the input for our experimentation. Experiments were conducted with P AM data subsequence length for Euclidean distance measure as observed clustering algorithm using various subsequence lengths ranging from in Table 2. L=1 to L=5. For varying subsequence lengths, the number of cluster These results show that in web log mining task where web logs values (that is k) was also varied and the results were recorded. exhibit sequentiality, ignoring the sequence information may lead to As can be observed from the Table 2 that as the length of the incorrect grouping. subsequence increases a lower sum-of-squared error was observed irrespective of the distance/similarity measure used. Results demon3 Clustering using global ordering information strate that for the same k, i.e. number of clusters higher subsequence Capturing global ordering information means that while using selengths result in better grouping. To determine the better grouping quences for clustering task whole sequence should be directly fed to sum-of-squared error is used. In grouping or clustering problem the clustering model. The clustering model should compute the dislower the sum-of-squared value better the result. These results in-

Table 2. Clustering results using different distance/similrarity measures

Number of clusters 2 3 4 5

SL=1 Number of Sum of Iterations Squared Error 41 4091.5 67 3891.2 72 4139.2 83 4252,1

2 3 4 5

12 12 14 14

3741.2 3471.3 3856.1 4034.3

2 3 4 5

23 25 25 31

3986.72 3607.4 3903.6 4117.53

2 3 4 5

15 16 16 18

3813.1 3541.2 3912.6 4092.1

Clustering result using Euclidean measure SL=2 SL=3 SL=4 Number of Sum of Number of Sum of Number of Sum of Iterations Squared Iterations Squared Iterations Squared Error Error Error 44 4123.2 56 4254.6 63 4192.6 56 3902.7 72 4113.5 82 4157.4 81 4254.6 83 4380.1 92 4412.5 65 4290.1 87 4379.6 82 4471.3 Clustering result using Jaccard measure 13 3701.8 13 3653.1 15 3534.7 12 3319.6 14 3302.3 15 3219.8 15 3709.3 15 3593.7 18 3498.6 15 3917.5 19 3834.1 22 3723.5 Clustering result using Cosine measure 24 3342.6 25 3251.2 24 3113.47 25 3513.1 27 3416.9 24 3398.2 29 3811.4 35 3612.1 40 3514.7 43 4012.3 40 3916.4 43 3812.3 Clustering result using BWC measure 15 3801.4 16 3767.3 17 3712.9 16 3490.4 18 3411.3 18 3397.6 17 3848.2 17 3769.8 18 3689.4 17 3991.8 18 3906.1 19 3812.5

tance/similarity between pair of sequences in their raw format (i.e, the way it exist) considering the order information. With this intuition in mind we utilized S 3 M (Sequence and Set similarity Measure) for computing similarity between pair of sequences [5]. In order to perform clustering using global ordering information we utilized a framework called, SeqP AM [9]. The baseline for the framework is P AM clustering algorithm. The algorithm constructs similarity matrix using S 3 M .

3.1

Experimental results

Experiments were conducted on msnbc web log dataset. Preprocessed msnbc dataset with 44,062 user sessions was given as input to SeqP AM . Number of clusters that is, k value was fixed at 12 for experimentation. As these clusters are composed of sessions that are sequence in nature, the cost associated with converting the sequences within a cluster to the cluster representative must be minimum. At the same time, the cost of converting the sequences from two different clusters must be high. We computed a well known measure of the conversion cost of sequences, namely, the Levenshtein Distance (ALD) for each cluster. The Average Levenshtein Distance reflects the goodness of the clusters. The ALD obtained on the msnbc dataset using SeqP AM clustering algorithm is 4.2685 and the inter-cluster Levenshtein Distances among the 12 clusters ranged from 4 to 6. Both the values indicate that the SeqP AM groupings have preserved sequence information embedded in the msnbc dataset.

SL=5 Number of Sum of Iterations Squared Error 74 4019.5 91 4215.9 98 4519.2 91 4567.2 19 18 18 26

3519.5 3118.4 3209.4 3694.2

33 41 44 49

2913.52 3107.4 3486.2 3772.4

18 19 20 21

3602.1 3291.1 3529.8 3791.6

ALD obtained with SeqP AM is less than P AM (4.2685 < 4.4585) thus indicating that the intra-cluster distance for SeqP AM is lower. We also recorded the Levensthein Distance (LD) for each cluster and observed that for SeqP AM the LD value was less than that for P AM (except for the 3 clusters out of the 12 clusters). This figure indicates that in the SeqP AM clustering algorithm the cost of converting a sequence to its cluster representative is less as compared to P AM . The high values obtained for LD indicate better clustering result as compared to P AM . Since the length of sequences being considered for experimentation from msnbc dataset is 6, the maximum value for inter-cluster distance (LD) can be 6. For SeqP AM we obtained the value of 6 for 26 pairs of clusters whereas for P AM it was observed only among 9 pairs. Thus these results indicate that the cost of converting a sequence taken from two different clusters formed in SeqP AM is higher than those from the clusters of P AM . The detailed result can be found in [9]. Thus we can conclude from the results that the clusters formed due to SeqP AM have high inter-cluster distance as well as low intra- cluster distance than those formed due to P AM . The aim of this paper is to establish the importance of order information for personalizing web sites. To this end, we have come up with a recommendation scheme (using global ordering information) wherein four most frequent page categories within each cluster are identified as shown in Table 3. From the Table, it can be seen that if a new session falls within the first cluster, then the following page categories are recommended for personalizing the user page: frontpage, news, health, and business.

Table 3. Recommendation Set frontpage news tech local opinion on-air misc weather health living business sports summary bbs travel msn-news msn-sports

4

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C2

C3

C4

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C8 √

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C9 √

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C10 √ √

C11

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C12

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Conclusion

User sessions comprising Web pages exhibit intrinsic sequential nature. This paper contributes in establishing the importance of order information in personalizing the web page visits. We demonstrated the usefulness of ordering information by conducting experiments using two techniques namely, capturing local ordering information and capturing global ordering information. In experiments of local ordering information we captured local ordering of sequence data using sliding window technique and performed clustering task. The results establishes that considering local ordering enhances the goodness of the clusters formed. S 3 M has been utilized which considers both the order of occurrence as well as the content information while computing similarity between them. S 3 M measure is a technique to global ordering information. Cluster quality is measured using a cluster validation index called, average levensthein distance (ALD). A personalization scheme based on clusters obtained from SeqPAM for msnbc dataset has been formulated.

5

C6

References

[1] T. W. Yan, M. Jacobsen, H. G. Molina, and U. Dayal, “From user access patterns to dynamic hypertext linking,” in Proceedings of the fifth international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks and ISDN systems, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1996, pp. 1007–1014, Elsevier Science Publishers. [2] G. Qian, S. Sural, Y. Gu, and S. Pramanik, “Similarity between euclidean and cosine angle distance for nearest neighbor queries,” in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing, New York, USA, 2004, pp. 1232–1237, ACM Press. [3] P. Gludici, Applied Data Mining , Statistical methods for business and industry, Wiely publication, 2003. [4] S. Rawat, V. P. Gulati, A. K. Pujari, and V. R. Vemuri, “Intrusion detection using processing techniques with a binary-weighted cosine metric,” Journal of Information Assurance and Security, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 43–58, 2006.



√ √

√ √

[5] Pradeep Kumar, M. Venkateswara Rao, P. Radha Krishna, Raju S. Bapi, and Arijit Laha, “Intrusion detection system using sequence and set preserving metric,” in Intelligence and Security Informatics, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2005, pp. 498– 504, LNCS. [6] Pradeep Kumar, M. Venkateswara Rao, P. Radha Krishna, and Raju S. Bapi, “Using sub-sequence information with kNN for classification of sequential data,” in Distributed Computing and Internet Technology, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2005, pp. 536–546, LNCS. [7] L. Kaufman and P. J. Rousseeuw, Finding Groups in Data: An introduction to cluster analysis, John Wiely and sons, New York, 1990. [8] http://kdd.ics.uci.edu/. [9] Pradeep Kumar, Raju S. Bapi, and P. Radha Krishna, “SeqPAM: A sequence clustering algorithm for web personalization,” International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 29– 53, 2007.

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