Prediction of User's Web-Browsing Behavior: Application of Markov Model

Web prediction is a classification problem in which we attempt to predict the next set of Web pages that a user may visit based on the knowledge of the previously visited pages. Predicting user's behavior while serving the Internet can be applied effectively in various critical applications. Such application has traditional tradeoffs between modeling complexity and prediction accuracy. In this paper, we analyze and study Markov model and all-Kth Markov model in Web prediction. We propose a new modified Markov model to alleviate the issue of scalability in the number of paths. In addition, we present a new two-tier prediction framework that creates an example classifier EC, based on the training examples and the generated classifiers. We show that such framework can improve the prediction time without compromising prediction accuracy. We have used standard benchmark data sets to analyze, compare, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques using variations of Markov models and association rule mining. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our modified Markov model in reducing the number of paths without compromising accuracy. Additionally, the results support our analysis conclusions that accuracy improves with higher orders of all-Kth model.