Towards an extensible web usage mining framework for actionable knowledge

With the emergence of Web 2.0 applications that bestow rich user experience and convenience without time and geographical restrictions, web usage logs became a goldmine to researchers across the globe. User behaviour analysis in different domains based on web logs has its utility for enterprises to have strategic decision making. Business growth of enterprises depends on customer-centric approaches that need to know the knowledge of customer behaviour to succeed. The rationale behind this is that customers have alternatives and there is intense competition. Therefore business community needs business intelligence to have expert decisions besides focusing customer relationship management. Many researchers contributed towards this end. However, the need for a comprehensive framework that caters to the needs of businesses to ascertain real needs of web users. This paper presents a framework named eXtensible Web Usage Mining Framework (XWUMF) for discovering actionable knowledge from web log data. The framework employs a hybrid approach that exploits fuzzy clustering methods and methods for user behaviour analysis. Moreover the framework is extensible as it can accommodate new algorithms for fuzzy clustering and user behaviour analysis. We proposed an algorithm known as Sequential Web Usage Miner (SWUM) for efficient mining of web usage patterns from different datasets. We built a prototype application to validate our framework. Our empirical results revealed that the framework helps in discovering actionable knowledge.