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Web User Segmentation Based on a Mixture of Factor Analyzers

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E-Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4082))

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Abstract

This paper proposes an approach for Web user segmentation and online behavior analysis based on a mixture of factor analyzers (MFA). In our proposed framework, we model users’ shared interests as a set of common latent factors extracted through factor analysis, and we discover user segments based on the posterior component distribution of a finite mixture model. This allows us to measure the relationships between users’ unobserved conceptual interests and their observed navigational behavior in a principled probabilistic manner. Our experimental results show that the MFA-based approach results in finer-grained representation of user behavior and can successfully discover heterogeneous user segments and characterize these segments with respect to their common preferences.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zhou, Y.K., Mobasher, B. (2006). Web User Segmentation Based on a Mixture of Factor Analyzers. In: Bauknecht, K., Pröll, B., Werthner, H. (eds) E-Commerce and Web Technologies. EC-Web 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4082. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11823865_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11823865_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37743-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37745-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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