Web usage mining using artificial ant colony clustering and linear genetic programming

The rapid e-commerce growth has made both business community and customers face a new situation. Due to intense competition on the one hand and the customer´s option to choose from several alternatives, the business community has realized the necessity of intelligent marketing strategies and relationship management. Web usage mining attempts to discover useful knowledge from the secondary data obtained from the interactions of the users with the Web. Web usage mining has become very critical for effective Web site management, creating adaptive Web sites, business and support services, personalization, network traffic flow analysis and so on. The study of ant colonies behavior and their self-organizing capabilities is of interest to knowledge retrieval/management and decision support systems sciences, because it provides models of distributed adaptive organization, which are useful to solve difficult optimization, classification, and distributed control problems, among others [Ramos, V. et al. (2002), (2000)]. In this paper, we propose an ant clustering algorithm to discover Web usage patterns (data clusters) and a linear genetic programming approach to analyze the visitor trends. Empirical results clearly show that ant colony clustering performs well when compared to a self-organizing map (for clustering Web usage patterns) even though the performance accuracy is not that efficient when compared to evolutionary-fuzzy clustering (i-miner) [Abraham, A. (2003)] approach.