Classifying User Behavior in Linux Sessions

Classification is an integral part of many types of problem solving such as diagnosis, understanding, and as a component in prediction and design. Here, hierarchical classification is used to determine a user´s behavior in a Linux environment as the user enters commands via a command-line prompt. Once successfully classified, one might be able to either predict what the user is trying to accomplish and help assist the user, or perform error correction when the user types in a command that is either syntactically incorrect or contains incorrect parameters (e.g., misspelled filename). This paper reports on the first part of this project, using hierarchical classification to correctly identify what a user is trying to accomplish, and briefly discuss future work on error correction and prediction.