Research and development of data preprocessing in Web Usage Mining

Web Usage Mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover usage patterns from Web data, in order to understand and better serve the needs of Web-based applications. There are several preprocessing tasks that must be performed prior to applying data mining algorithms to the data collected from server logs. Data preprocessing is the process to convert the raw data into the data abstraction necessary for the further applying the data mining algorithm. This paper presents several data preparation techniques that. can be used to improve the performance of data preprocessing in order to identify unique users and user sessions. These techniques and algorithms have been proved valid and efficient by experiments. Finally, we conclude this paper and propose the future research directions.