Visually mining Web user clickpaths

As powerful as clickpath mining methods can be, they often lead to huge incomprehensible and non-interesting result sets. Our clickpath mining practice at MSN was faced with challenges of keeping analysts closer to the data exploration process, revealing powerful insight from clickpath mining that business owners can directly act upon. These challenges stressed the importance of an interactive and visual representation of clickpath mining results. Most products today that can perform clickpath visualization do so by presenting massive cross-weaving web graphs. We present a new type of clickpath visualization which focuses only on clickpaths of interest, simplifying the visualization space while still retaining the same degree of mineable knowledge in the data. We also describe visualization techniques we have used to enhance the detection of interesting clickpath patterns from data, and provide a real-life case study that has benefited from the use of our implemented clickpath visualizer PAVE.