Web User Session Reconstruction Using Integer Programming

An important input for Web usage mining is Web user sessions that must be reconstructed from Web logs (sessionization) when such sessions are not otherwise identified. We present a novel approach for sessionization based on an integer program. We compare results of our approach with the timeout heuristic on Web logs from an academic Web site. We find our integer program provides sessions that better match an expected empirical distribution with about half of the standard error of the heuristic.