Web usage mining: A review on process, methods and techniques

In Current era, internet is playing such a vital role in our everyday life that it is very difficult to survive without it. The World Wide Web (WWW) has influenced a lot to both users (visitors) as well as the web site owners. Enormous growth of World Wide Web increases the complexity for users to browse effectively. To increase the performance of web sites better web site design, web server activities are changed as per users' interests. To achieve this they have to analyze user access pattern which are captured in the form of log files. Web usage mining is a process of analyzing interaction of user with different web application. Web usage mining can be seen as three step process: data pre-processing, pattern discovery and pattern analysis. Due to tremendous use of web, web log files are increase with faster rate and size is also huge. These data are usually noisy and ambiguous hence preprocessing step is essential in mining process. Different pre-processing techniques are data cleaning, user identification, session identification and transaction identification. In this paper, we provide detailed survey of work done so far on data collection and pre-processing stage of web usage mining.