Modeling Web Browsing Behavior across Tabs and Websites with Tracking and Prediction on the Client Side
Changkun Ou, Daniel Buschek, Malin Eiband, Andreas Butz

TL;DR
This paper introduces a client-side machine learning approach to model and predict complex web browsing behaviors, including multi-tab actions, while preserving user privacy, based on a formal sequence modeling framework evaluated with real user data.
Contribution
It presents a novel sequence modeling formalism for web clickstreams that captures multi-tab and backtracking actions, enabling behavior prediction and interpretation.
Findings
Model successfully distinguishes browsing behaviors
Accurately predicts future user actions
Identifies five common browsing patterns
Abstract
Clickstreams on individual websites have been studied for decades to gain insights into user interests and to improve website experiences. This paper proposes and examines a novel sequence modeling approach for web clickstreams, that also considers multi-tab branching and backtracking actions across websites to capture the full action sequence of a user while browsing. All of this is done using machine learning on the client side to obtain a more comprehensive view and at the same time preserve privacy. We evaluate our formalism with a model trained on data collected in a user study with three different browsing tasks based on different human information seeking strategies from psychological literature. Our results show that the model can successfully distinguish between browsing behaviors and correctly predict future actions. A subsequent qualitative analysis identified five common web…
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Taxonomy
TopicsWeb Data Mining and Analysis · Caching and Content Delivery · Recommender Systems and Techniques
