A Constraint Programming Approach for Web Log Mining

Mining web access patterns consists in extracting knowledge from server log files. This problem is represented as a sequential pattern mining problem (SPM) which allows to extract patterns which are sequences of accesses that occur frequently in the web log file. There are in the literature many efficient algorithms to solve SMP (e.g., GSP, SPADE, PrefixSpan, WAP-tree, LAPIN, PLWAP). Despite the effectiveness of these methods, they do not allow to express and to handle new constraints defined on patterns, new implementations are required. Recently, many approaches based on constraint programming (CP) was proposed to solve SPM in a declarative and generic way. Since no CP-based approach was applied for mining web access patterns, the authors introduce in this paper an efficient CP-based approach for solving the web log mining problem. They bring back the problem of web log mining to SPM within a CP environment which enables to handle various constraints. Experimental results on non-trivial web log mining problems show the effectiveness of the authors' CP-based mining approach.