Basic steps as how to web usage mine in sql server 2005

Question

Hi there,
I am doing a project on web usage mining of my universities server logs and im just wondering how i go about mining them in sql server 2005?
Do i mine them in one table? do i normalise the web log data? what algorithms will i use on them as im trying to get usage patterns from the users and also where most of the users come from.
Thanks in advance
Gary

Answer 1

Hi
Here’re some thoughts that might help you design your Data Mining for weblogs:
1.     You can put the data in one or more tables as per the semantics of the data. Data which is an entity by itself should be put in a flat table with one key per entry (user sessions on the web server for example), whereas some data naturally will have a many to one relation with the primary data (page visits per session for example) and can be put in a separate table with primary/foreign key relationship. SQL Server 2005 will model them as case table/nested table for the purpose of mining.
2.     Normalize: Depends on what your data looks like. If you want to run clustering algorithm and your data has two attributes, A and B and A is 10 times more important than B, you should normalize accordingly. If the actual values of A are in order of thousand and actual values ob B are in order of tens and they are equally important, you should again normalize. However, if you want to use the as-is value without a weight, you do not have to normalize the data.
3.     Usage Patterns, like a sequence of page visits can be modeled using sequence clustering algorithm. User categorization based on attributes might be a clustering algorithm. If you have more information on what you want to find out, I might be able to suggest more specific choices.
Hope this helps
Shuvro