Web Mining. 3 credits, 3 contact hours

Catalog description

Prerequisite: IS 665 . Web mining aims to discover useful information and knowledge from the Web hyperlink structure, page contents and usage logs. It has direct applications in e-commerce, Web analytics, information retrieval/filtering, personalization, and recommender systems. Employees knowledgeable about Web mining techniques and their applications are highly sought by major Web companies such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo, MSN and others who need to understand user behavior and utilize discovered patterns from terabytes of user profile data to design more intelligent applications. The primary focus of this course is on Web usage mining and its applications to business intelligence and biomedical domains. We learn techniques from machine learning, data mining, text mining, and databases to extract useful knowledge from the Web and other unstructured/semistructured, hypertextual, distributed information repositories. This data could be used for site management, automatic personalization, recommendation, and user profiling. Topics covered include crawling, indexing, ranking and filtering algorithms using text and link analysis, applications to search, classification, tracking, monitoring, and Web intelligence. Programming assignments give hands-on experience. A group project highlights class topics.