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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cooley, R., Mobasher, B., Srivastava, J.: Data preparation for mining world wide web browsing patterns. Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems 1(1) (1999)
Frey, B.J., Colmenarez, A., Huang, T.S.: Mixtures of local linear subspaces for face recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Los Alamitos (June 1998)
Ghahramani, Z., Hinton, G.: The EM algorithm for mixture of factor analyzers. Technical report CRG-TR-96-1, University of Toronto (1996)
Lin, W., Alvarez, S.A., Ruiz, C.: Efficient adaptive-support association rule mining for recommender systems. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 6, 83–105 (2002)
McLachlan, G., Peel, D.: Mixtures of factor analyzers. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning, San Francisco, USA (2000)
Mobasher, B.: Web usage mining and personalization. In: Singh, M.P. (ed.) Practical Handbook of Internet Computing. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2005)
Mobasher, B., Dai, H., Luo, T., Nakagawa, M.: Effective personalization based on association rule discovery from web usage data. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2001), Atlanta, Georgia (November 2001)
Mobasher, B., Dai, H., Luo, T., Nakagawa, M.: Discovery and evaluation of aggregate usage profiles for web personalization. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 6, 61–82 (2002)
Saul, L.K., Rahim, M.G.: Modeling acoustic correlations by factor analysis. In: Jordan, M.I., Kearn, M.S., Solla, S.A. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10, pp. 749–756. MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)
Srivastava, J., Cooley, R., Deshpande, M., Tan, P.: Web usage mining: Discovery and applications of usage patterns from web data. SIGKDD Explorations 1(2), 12–23 (2000)
Wedel, M., Kamakura, W.: Market Segmentation: Conceptual and Methodological Foundations. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Zhou, Y., Jin, X., Mobasher, B.: A recommendation model based on latent principal factors in web navigation data. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Web Dynamics at WWW 2004, New York (May 2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
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)