Web User Clustering and Its Application to Prefetching Using ART Neural Networks

In this paper, we present a novel approach to group users according to their Web access patterns. Our technique for grouping users is based on the ART1 neural network. We compare the quality of clustering of our ART1 based clustering technique with that of the K-Means clustering algorithm in terms of inter-cluster and intra-cluster distances. Our results show that the average inter-cluster distance of the clusters formed by K-Means algorithm varies from 12.66 to 24.20, while the average inter-cluster distance of clusters formed by our ART1 based clustering technique is almost constant (approximately 18.01), which indicates the high quality of clusters formed by our approach. We present a prefetching scheme in which we apply our clustering technique to group users and then prefetch their requests according to the prototype vector of each group. Our prefetching scheme has prediction accuracy as high as 97.78%.

[1]  B. Moore,et al.  ART1 and pattern clustering , 1989 .

[2]  Daniel R. Tauritz,et al.  Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART): An Introduction , 1995 .

[3]  Tian Zhang,et al.  BIRCH: an efficient data clustering method for very large databases , 1996, SIGMOD '96.

[4]  Evangelos P. Markatos,et al.  A top- 10 approach to prefetching on the web , 1996 .

[5]  Jeffrey C. Mogul,et al.  Using predictive prefetching to improve World Wide Web latency , 1996, CCRV.

[6]  Vaduvur Bharghavan,et al.  Alleviating the Latency and Bandwidth Problems in WWW Browsing , 1997, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[7]  Jaideep Srivastava,et al.  Web mining: information and pattern discovery on the World Wide Web , 1997, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence.

[8]  Wei Lin,et al.  Web prefetching between low-bandwidth clients and proxies: potential and performance , 1999, SIGMETRICS '99.

[9]  PatternsYongjian,et al.  Clustering of Web Users Based on Access , 1999 .

[10]  Kyuseok Shim,et al.  Data mining and the Web: past, present and future , 1999, WIDM '99.

[11]  Cheng-Zhong Xu,et al.  Neural nets based predictive prefetching to tolerate WWW latency , 2000, Proceedings 20th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[12]  Georgios Paliouras,et al.  Clustering the Users of Large Web Sites into Communities , 2000, ICML.

[13]  Padhraic Smyth,et al.  Visualization of navigation patterns on a Web site using model-based clustering , 2000, KDD '00.

[14]  Vir V. Phoha,et al.  Web user clustering from access log using belief function , 2001, K-CAP '01.

[15]  Vir V. Phoha,et al.  An Adaptive Web Cache Access Predictor Using Neural Network , 2002, IEA/AIE.

[16]  S. Sitharama Iyengar,et al.  Faster Web Page Allocation with Neural Networks , 2002, IEEE Internet Comput..