Clustering navigation patterns on a website using a Sequence Alignment Method

In this paper, a new method is illustrated to cluster navigation patterns on a website. Instead of clustering users by means of a Euclidean distance measure, in our approach users are partitioned into clusters using a Sequence Alignment Method. This method ensures that sequential relationships, which are captured in the data, are taken into account. The performance of the algorithm is compared with the results of a method based on Euclidean distance measures. The proposed method is validated using usertraffic data from a Belgian telecom provider. Empirical results show that the method extracts sequences with similar behavioural patterns not only with regard to content but also considering the order of pages that are visited in a sequence.

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