Application Areas of Web Usage Mining

The ongoing increase in the usage of web has led to accumulation of large amounts of data every second. This has in turn made the research industry to grow and focus towards employing web usage mining for increasing the revenues for businesses, carrying out analysis on browsing behavior of web users, improving website layout and much more. Web usage mining is becoming increasingly popular due to the huge amounts of benefits it offers. The most significant amount of information about the web usage by the users is contained in log files usually called as server log files. The clicks made by the user, the order in which they are made and the time spent on each web page is all contained in these logs and is referred to as click stream data or click path data. An attempt has been made through this paper to provide a holistic view as to what click stream data analysis is, how mining techniques are applied on such data to generate useful information and what kind of applications exploit it to get useful information.