Modeling the Browsing Behavior of World Wide Web Users

Frederick Kin Hing Phoa; Juana Sanchez

doi:10.4236/ojs.2013.32016

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Modeling the Browsing Behavior of World Wide Web Users

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DOI: 10.4236/ojs.2013.32016 4,652 Downloads 7,462 Views Citations

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Frederick Kin Hing Phoa, Juana Sanchez

Affiliation(s)

Department of Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei City, Taiwan.

ABSTRACT

The World Wide Web is essential to general public nowadays. From a data analysis viewpoint, it provides rich opportunities to gather observational data on a large-scale. This paper focuses on modeling the behavior of visitors to an academic website. Although the conventional probability models, which were used by other literature for fitting in a commercial web site, capture the power law behavior in our data, they fail to capture other important features like the long tail. We propose a new model based on the identities of the users. Qualitative and quantitative tests, which are used for comparing the model fitting to our data, show that the new model outperforms other two conventional probability models.

KEYWORDS

Power Law; Long Tail; Negative Binomial Distribution; Inverse Gaussian Distribution; Pareto Distribution; Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Cite this paper

F. Phoa and J. Sanchez, "Modeling the Browsing Behavior of World Wide Web Users," Open Journal of Statistics, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2013, pp. 145-154. doi: 10.4236/ojs.2013.32016.

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