Agent-Based Characterization of Web Regularities

In Web Intelligence (WI) applications, it is common practice to record Web log data What remains a great challenge in Web log mining is how to characterize the underlying user behavior from the obtained data In this chapter, we will focus on how to interpret strong regularities in Web surfing in terms of user decision-making patterns, and present an information foraging agent-based approach to characterizing user behavior. The experimental results based on information foraging agents enable us not only to capture the empirical regularities collected from a real-world Web site, but also to effectively unveil the underlying decision-making mechanisms in user surfing as well as how variables in such mechanisms can affect the empirically observed emergent regularities.

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