sions. Each user session is represented by an n-
dimensional features vector, where n is the number
of Web pages visited during the last 30 minutes in the
session. The computation of weight is based on a dif-
ferent parameters (like the number of times the page
has been accessed, the amount of time the user spent
on the page). A partitioning clustering method is em-
ployed by (Cadez et al., 2000), which visualizes user
navigation paths in each cluster. In this system, users’
sessions are represented using categories of general
topics for Web pages. A number of predefined cat-
egories are used as a bias, and URLs are assigned to
them, constructing the user sessions. The Expectation
Maximization (EM) algorithm, based on mixtures of
Markov chains is used for clustering user sessions.
An extension of partitioning clustering methods is
fuzzy clustering that allows the presence of ambigui-
ties in the data, by ’distributing’ each object from the
data set over the various clusters. Such a fuzzy clus-
tering method is proposed in (Joshi and Joshi, 2000)
for grouping user sessions, where each session in-
cludes URLs that represent a certain traversal path.
The Web site topology is used as a bias in comput-
ing the similarity between sessions. The site is mod-
elled using a tree, where each node corresponds to an
URL in the site, while each edge represents a hierar-
chical relation between URLs. The computation of
the similarity between sessions is based on the rela-
tive position in the site tree of the URLs included in
the sessions.
Model-based clustering methods have been also
used in (Paliouras et al., 2000). A probabilistic
method, a neural network Self-Organizing Maps, and
a conceptual clustering method, are exploited in order
to construct user community models (i.e. models for
groups of users with similar usage patterns). Com-
munity models are derived as characterizations of the
clusters and correspond to the interests of users’ com-
munities.
Despite of the variety of clustering methods that
have been used for Web usage mining, no work has
been done on the comparison of their performance.
The reason for this is the inherent difficulty in com-
paring clustering results, due to the lack of objective
criteria independent of the specific application (Pier-
rakos et al., 2003).
3 SELLER AGENT TRIGGER
In order to determine the onset triggering factors of
seller agent for each customer, we are interested in at
least 2 different aspects, i.e.:
• how can the agent characterize clients’ behaviors, and
• how will the agent’s appearance be performed.
The first aspect listed above is in the field of Web
Usage Mining. Research has focused on methods,
based on Web Mining and Machine Learning algo-
rithms, to automatically analyze different data (from
questionnaires, observation of sales areas, interviews
with clients and vendors, loyalty programs or internet
data such as web server logs) in order to obtain the
most relevant information.
To answer the second aspect, we will study the
seller agent trigger based on customer navigation
analysis.
It means that our system has to categorize a user
who is surfing on the commercial website. The seller
agent should evaluate user expectations and motiva-
tions from his apparent behavior and habits. The
source of data is limited to the data we can collect
(e.g. visited pages, request, connection time, the use
of site tools, etc.). The main problem is to determine
the kind of client’s behaviors we could regroup based
upon navigation information and how user’s classes
can be evaluated. The proposed methods also take
into account the visit context like the year period (va-
cation, sales period, etc.), the day of week or the hour.
By the expression creation of customers’ behavior
we mean the analysis of customers’ navigation traces
on the commercial website in order to detect the most
significant and common profiles - clustering. The cre-
ation of the triggering rules set is based directly on the
customers’ behavior types detected.
To perform acceptable triggering rules of the agent
we should first identify the web users, then create and
analyze the general customers’ behavior and at last
define the set of rules of virtual agent triggering.
We concentrate our research on two sorts of rules
of virtual seller agent trigger: the specific and the gen-
eral rules. The general rules are divided into direct
rules and transition rules.
As an example of specific rules, we can consider
the cases where a user enters on support pages of
ecommerce website, or when the client try to buy sev-
eral products of the same family with incoherent pa-
rameters (like for example a size of a duvet cover may
be different from size of a flat sheet). In first case we
can lunch the virtual seller in order to perform assis-
tance, in the second case the agent can suggest the
possibility of confusion of products features. These
rules could satisfy a customer but as they are too spe-
cific and detailed, the number of agent triggers based
on these rules will be the most of time low. Even if the
specific rules will have high precision it seems impos-
sible to predict all the situations they can be adapted,
it means that the recall will be low.
For this reason we have to develop general rules
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