What is Augmented Sessions

Customized web services are offered to users by grouping them according to their access patterns. Clustering techniques are very useful in grouping users and analyzing web access patterns. Clustering can be an object clustering performed on feature vectors or relational clustering performed on relational data. The relational clustering is preferred over object clustering for web users' sessions because of high dimensionality and sparsity of web users' data. However, relational clustering of web users depends on underlying dissimilarity measures used. Therefore, correct dissimilarity measure for matching relational web access patterns between user sessions is very important. In this chapter, the various dissimilarity measures used in relational clustering of web users' data are discussed. The concept of an augmented user session is also discussed to derive different augmented session dissimilarity measures. The discussed session dissimilarity measures are used with relational fuzzy clustering algorithms. The comparative performance binary session similarity and augmented session similarity measures are evaluated using intra-cluster and inter-cluster distance-based cluster quality ratio. The results suggested the augmented session dissimilarity measures in general, and intuitive augmented session (dis)similarity measure, in particular, performed better than the other measures.