Building association-rule based sequential classifiers for web-document prediction

Web servers keep track of web users' browsing behavior in web logs. From these logs, one can build statistical models that predict the users' next requests based on their current behavior. These data are complex due to their large size and sequential nature. In the past, researchers have proposed different methods for building association-rule based prediction models using the web logs, but there has been no systematic study on the relative merits of these methods. In this paper, we provide a comparative study on different kinds of sequential association rules for web document prediction. We show that the existing approaches can be cast under two important dimensions, namely the type of antecedents of rules and the criterion for selecting prediction rules. From this comparison we propose a best overall method and empirically test the proposed model on real web logs.