Web Mining

Web Mining is the process of Data Mining techniques to automatically discover and extract information from Web documents and services. The main purpose of web mining is to discover useful information from the World Wide Web and its usage patterns. 

What is Data Mining?

Web mining is the best type of practice for sifting through the vast amount of data in the system that is available on the World Wide Web to find and extract pertinent information as per requirements. One unique feature of web mining is its ability to deliver a wide range of required data types in the actual process. There are various elements of the web that lead to diverse methods for the actual mining process. For example, web pages are made up of text; they are connected by hyperlinks in the system or process; and web server logs allow for the monitoring of user behavior to simplify all the required systems. Combining all the required methods from data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics, and information retrieval, web mining is an interdisciplinary field for the overall system. Analyzing user behavior and website traffic is the one basic type or example of web mining.

Applications of Web Mining

Web mining is the process of discovering patterns, structures, and relationships in web data. It involves using data mining techniques to analyze web data and extract valuable insights. The applications of web mining are wide-ranging and include:

• Personalized marketing:Web mining can be used to analyze customer behavior on websites and social media platforms. This information can be used to create personalized marketing campaigns that target customers based on their interests and preferences.
• E-commerce: Web mining can be used to analyze customer behavior on e-commerce websites. This information can be used to improve the user experience and increase sales by recommending products based on customer preferences.
• Search engine optimization: Web mining can be used to analyze search engine queries and search engine results pages (SERPs). This information can be used to improve the visibility of websites in search engine results and increase traffic to the website.
• Fraud detection: Web mining can be used to detect fraudulent activity on websites. This information can be used to prevent financial fraud, identity theft, and other types of online fraud.
• Sentiment analysis: Web mining can be used to analyze social media data and extract sentiment from posts, comments, and reviews. This information can be used to understand customer sentiment towards products and services and make informed business decisions.
• Web content analysis: Web mining can be used to analyze web content and extract valuable information such as keywords, topics, and themes. This information can be used to improve the relevance of web content and optimize search engine rankings.
• Customer service: Web mining can be used to analyze customer service interactions on websites and social media platforms. This information can be used to improve the quality of customer service and identify areas for improvement.
• Healthcare: Web mining can be used to analyze health-related websites and extract valuable information about diseases, treatments, and medications. This information can be used to improve the quality of healthcare and inform medical research.

Process of Web Mining

Web Mining Process

Web mining can be broadly divided into three different types of techniques of mining: Web Content Mining, Web Structure Mining, and Web Usage Mining. These are explained as following below.

Categories of Web Mining

• Web Content Mining: Web content mining is the application of extracting useful information from the content of the web documents. Web content consist of several types of data – text, image, audio, video etc. Content data is the group of facts that a web page is designed. It can provide effective and interesting patterns about user needs. Text documents are related to text mining, machine learning and natural language processing. This mining is also known as text mining. This type of mining performs scanning and mining of the text, images and groups of web pages according to the content of the input.
• Web Structure Mining: Web structure mining is the application of discovering structure information from the web. The structure of the web graph consists of web pages as nodes, and hyperlinks as edges connecting related pages. Structure mining basically shows the structured summary of a particular website. It identifies relationship between web pages linked by information or direct link connection. To determine the connection between two commercial websites, Web structure mining can be very useful.
• Web Usage Mining: Web usage mining is the application of identifying or discovering interesting usage patterns from large data sets. And these patterns enable you to understand the user behaviors or something like that. In web usage mining, user access data on the web and collect data in form of logs. So, Web usage mining is also called log mining.

Challenges of Web Mining

• Complexity of required web pages: Basically, there is no cohesive framework throughout the site’s pages so when compared to conventional text, they are incredibly intricate in the process. The web’s digital library contains a vast number of documents in the actual system. There is no set order in which these libraries are typically arranged for the user.
• Dynamic data source in the internet: The required online data is updated in real time. For instance, news, weather, fashion, finance, sports, and so forth is not possible to indicate properly.
• Data relevancy: It is much believed that a particular person is typically only concerned with a limited percentage of the internet throughout the process, with the remaining portion containing data that may provide unexpected outcomes for the actual requirement and is unfamiliar to the user to verify.
• Too much large web: Basically, the web is getting bigger and bigger very quickly in the system. The web seems to be too big for data mining and data warehousing as per requirement.

Comparison between Data Mining and Web Mining

Parameters	Data Mining	Web Mining
Definition	Data Mining is the process that attempts to discover pattern and hidden knowledge in large data sets in any system.	Web Mining is the process of data mining techniques to automatically discover and extract information from web documents.
Application	Data Mining is very useful for web page analysis.	Web Mining is very useful for a particular website and e-service.
Target Users	Data scientist and data engineers.	Data scientists along with data analysts.
Structure	In Data Mining get the information from explicit structure.	In Web Mining get the information from structured, unstructured and semi-structured web pages.
Problem Type	Clustering, classification, regression, prediction, optimization and control.	Web content mining, Web structure mining.
Tools	It includes tools like machine learning algorithms.	Special tools for web mining are Scrapy, PageRank and Apache logs.
Skills	It includes approaches for data cleansing, machine learning algorithms. Statistics and probability.	It includes application level knowledge, data engineering with mathematical modules like statistics and probability.

Conclusion

The actual technique of finding patterns and gaining knowledge for the system requirements from web data is known as web mining. It is employed in many different fields as per need, including fraud detection, e-commerce, and marketing process. The overall applications range widely and have a significant influence, from tailored advice to improvements in healthcare for the future aspect. The text mining, natural language processing, picture analysis, link analysis, and other methods are the initial examples of web mining approaches for the system as well as users. While the data mining process is used with proper structured and semi-structured data, web mining mostly works with the unique unstructured web data.