Website link prediction using a Markov chain model based on multiple time periods

摘要

Growing size and complexity of many websites have made navigation through these sites increasingly difficult. Attempting to automatically predict the next page for a website user to visit has many potential benefits, for example in site navigation, automatic tour generation, adaptive web applications, recommendation systems, web server optimisation, web search and web pre-fetching. This paper describes an approach to link prediction using a Markov chain model based on an exponentially smoothed transition probability matrix which incorporates site usage statistics collected over multiple time periods. The improved performance of this approach compared to earlier methods is also discussed.