Clickstream Analysis

Thesis introduces current research trends in clickstream analysis and proposes a new heuristic that could be used for dimensionality reduction of semantically enriched data in Web Usage Mining (WUM). Click-fraud and conversion fraud are identified as key prospective application areas for WUM. Thesis documents a conversion fraud vulnerability of Google Analytics and proposes defense - a new clickstream acquisition software, which collects data in sufficient granularity and structure to allow for data mining approaches to fraud detection. Three variants of K-means clustering algorithms and three association rule data mining systems are evaluated and compared on real-world web usage data.