Web Mining

Web Mining Data mining is the nontrivial process of identifying valid novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns in data – Fayyad. The most commonly used techniques in data mining is artificial neural networks, decision trees, genetic algorithm, nearest_neighbour method, and rule induction. Data mining research has drawn on a number of other fields such as inductive learning, machine learning and statistics etc.
Machine learning – is the automation of a learning process and learning is based on observations of environmental statistics and transitions. Machine learning examines previous examples and their outcomes and learns how to reproduce these make generalizations about new uses.
Inductive learning – Induction means inference of information from data and Inductive learning is a model building process where the database is analyzed to find patterns. Main strategies are supervised learning and unsupervised learning.
Statistics: used to detect unusual patterns and explain patterns using statistical models such as linear models.
Data mining models can be a discovery model – it is the system automatically discovering important information hidden in the data or verification model – takes an hypothesis from the user and tests the validity of it against the data.
The web contains collection of pages that includes countless hyperlinks and huge volumes of access and usage information. Because of the ever-increasing amount of information in cyberspace, knowledge discovery and web mining are becoming critical for successfully conducting business in the cyber world. Web mining is the discovery and analysis of useful information from the web. Web mining is the use of data mining techniques to automatically discover and extract information from web documents and services (content, structure, and usage). Two different approaches were taken in initially defining web mining: i. Process_centric View – Web mining as a sequnce of tasks ii.