Title: Optimising web usage mining for building adaptive e-learning site: a case study

Authors: Renuka Mahajan; J.S. Sodhi; Vishal Mahajan

Addresses: AIIT, Amity, Noida, UP, India ' AKC Data Systems, Delhi, India ' HCL Technologies, Noida, UP, India

Abstract: An important application of web usage mining is mining web log data. We propose a new optimised technique for web mining, in the realm of an e-learning site to recommend the best links for a learner to visit the next. It optimises web mining, by partitioning the database, on the basis of the learner's knowledge level, to create a suffix tree(s) from the existing sequences of previous 'n' learners' path. To further reduce the overhead of re-mining the web patterns, we propose that a web traversal pattern should be regarded as significant, only if it qualifies the minimum threshold of length and frequency in the database. These significant patterns are added to suffixes. They are then mined, using the most efficient mining algorithm after a comparative analysis of various algorithms, to find the most frequent navigation paths for recommendation to n + 1^th new learner. We conducted experiments on a real case study of an Indian e-learning site. This is verified by experiments with promising results on computational time. This speed up obtained, in web pattern mining, is a meaningful approach for building recommender based e-learning system.

Keywords: web usage mining; personalisation; suffix tree; PL WAP; GSP; FP growth; WAP mine; navigation prediction; adaptive e-learning; frequent pattern mining; web log data; blog data; recommender systems; electronic learning; recommendation systems; online learning; optimsation; case study; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIL.2015.072459

International Journal of Innovation and Learning, 2015 Vol.18 No.4, pp.471 - 486

Received: 16 Jan 2014
Accepted: 06 Jul 2014
Published online: 14 Oct 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article