SeqPAM: A Sequence Clustering Algorithm for Web Personalization

Abstract

With the growth in the number of web users and necessity for making information available on the web, the problem of web personalization has become very critical and popular. Developers are trying to customize a web site to the needs of specific users with the help of knowledge acquired from user navigational behavior. Since user page visits are intrinsically sequential in nature, efficient clustering algorithms for sequential data are needed. In this paper, we introduce a similarity preserving function called sequence and set similarity measure S3M that captures both the order of occurrence of page visits as well as the content of pages. We conducted pilot experiments comparing the results of PAM, a standard clustering algorithm, with two similarity measures: Cosine and S3M. The goodness of the clusters resulting from both the measures was computed using a cluster validation technique based on average levensthein distance. Results on pilot dataset established the effectiveness of S3M for sequential data. Based on these results, we proposed a new clustering algorithm, SeqPAM for clustering sequential data. We tested the new algorithm on two datasets namely, cti and msnbc datasets. We provided recommendations for web personalization based on the clusters obtained from SeqPAM for msnbc dataset.