Research on Web usage mining for electronic commerce

Web usage mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover usage patterns from Web data, in order to understand and better serve the needs of Web-based applications. On the other hand, the rapid growth of e-commerce has caused product overload where customers on the Web are no longer able to effectively choose the products they are exposed to. Applying Web usage mining techniques to e-commerce will be a solution to overcome these problems. This paper has attempted to provide a survey of the rapidly growing area of Web usage mining. We propose a framework of Web usage mining for e-commerce, discuss and analyze each module of the framework in detail, give some applications of which to e-commerce. Finally, we conclude this paper and propose the future research directions.