Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271

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Decision Support Systems

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / d s s

Web user behavioral profiling for user identification

Yinghui (Catherine) Yang ⁎
Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper, we propose a simple, yet powerful approach to profile users' web browsing behavior for the
Received 3 January 2008 purpose of user identification. The importance of being able to identify users can be significant given a wide
Received in revised form 24 January 2010 variety of applications in electronic commerce, such as product recommendation, personalized advertising,
Accepted 4 March 2010
etc. We create user profiles capturing the strength of users' behavioral patterns, which can be used to
Available online 9 March 2010
identify users. Our experiments indicate that these profiles can be more accurate at identifying users than
decision trees when sufficient web activities are observed, and can achieve higher efficiency than Support
Keywords:
Data mining
Vector Machines. The comparisons demonstrate that profile-based methods for user identification provide a
User profiles viable and simple alternative to this problem.
User identification © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Behavioral patterns

1. Introduction
The development of Information Technology has led to an
explosion of data. Businesses now gather and store more consumer
data than ever before. Similarly, the amount of recorded data
associated with individual users has grown tremendously in recent
years. This is particularly true in the online world. User information is
collected through online registrations and surveys. Moreover, infor-
mation about a web user's activity is often collected surreptitiously,
even as the user browses the web. Efficiently summarizing user-level
information so that it can be used effectively in electronic commerce is
an important problem.
User profiles can help to summarize the large amounts of infor-
mation available from a user and to achieve goals such as product
recommendations and personalized information delivery. A user profile
can include explicit information provided by users through registra-
tion and surveys [5,31]. Demographics such as a user's name, telephone
number, address and information about hobbies are often offered by
users explicitly. The simple facts about users' activity or transactions can
also be categorized as explicit information. For example, such facts can
include the frequency of a user's visit to a web site, the average amount
of money spent per purchase transaction and the most purchased
product category. A user profile can also contain implicit information
that is generated from analyzing users' activity often through more
sophisticated statistical or data mining techniques (e.g. finding usage
rules [4]).
In this paper, we build implicit user profiles for the purpose of user
identification. Previous research on web user identification has focused
⁎ Tel.: +1 530 754 5967; fax: +1 530 752 2924.
E-mail address: yiyang@ucdavis.edu.
mainly on the use of tracking techniques such as cookies, logins and keys
[20,23]. Below, we define the problem of user identification based on
user profiles built on web usage patterns. We establish a user profile for
each user from a group of known users based on their web activities, and
a given anonymous web session or a series of sessions can get matched
(or identified) to be one of these users or none of these users (i.e. if the
matching score is very low, then we can say that the user is not matched
to any one of the profiles). This is different from most biometric-based
identification (e.g. finger print or iris identification). For example, finger
print identification is able to handle very large scale identification
problems because there is a unique match between the finger print
and a user. Behavior-based identification will be less accurate when it
comes to large scale problems because many users could share similar
behavioral patterns. Therefore, identifying web users based solely on
their online behavior rather than using tracking techniques is a difficult
problem. Under cases where user identification based solely on behavior
is not feasible, behavioral information can be used together with other
tools to achieve better performance. For example, for a large online
retailer, several user accounts may share the same IP address (e.g.
members of the same family). The retailer might be able to identify the
members sharing the same IP address (assuming that there is some
known login information from this IP address which can be used to build
user profiles). The ability to further identify users within the shared IP
address can help achieve higher performance for many applications.
The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC)
advocates that authentication methodologies should involve multiple
channels to avoid exploiting single channel authentication systems.
Behavioral pattern-based user identification systems, if designed
properly, may provide one such additional channel in a multi-channel
approach. Designing such a system will require developing accurate
user identification models. This in turn requires a deeper understand-
ing of the factors in user behavior that can result in greater accuracy in

0167-9236/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.dss.2010.03.001
262 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271
user identification. Our research in this paper focuses on finding such
factors in capturing users' behavioral patterns using user profiles.
The recurring nature of one's behavior can potentially benefit user
identification. Behavioral patterns can represent the repeating elements
in users' activity. In the web context, such patterns can capture web
users' repeat visits to certain sites (e.g. in 40% of the days, a user visits
yahoo.com). Some more examples are: (a) 80% of a user's web sessions1
are over one hour long. (b) The number of pages a user visits in a web
session is often between 5 and 10. (c) Most of a user's sessions start with
cnn.com. The extent to which a behavioral pattern repeats itself can be
captured by the strength of a behavioral pattern. In this paper, we profile
web users according to the strength of their behavioral patterns. The
behavioral patterns are learned from users' web browsing activity
(e.g. visiting msn.com is a frequent behavioral pattern). Such frequent
behavioral patterns can be discovered using existing frequent pattern
discovery methods (e.g. Apriori [2]). Metrics similar to support and lift
are used to measure the strength of a behavioral pattern. For example, if
50% of a user's web sessions contain MySpace.com, then 50% measures
the strength of the pattern — visiting MySpace.com in a web session. If
we consider MySpace.com as an item, then 50% is the support of this
item [2]. A list of behavioral patterns together with metrics measuring
their strength is stored in a user's profile. At a certain point of time, user
profiles are built first on the data before that time (the profiling stage),
and then are applied to the data observed after that time point in order
to identify users (identification stage).
We conduct extensive experiments on user-centric web data to
evaluate the effectiveness of using our profiling approach to identify
web users. We compare our profile-based user identification proce-
dure with the classification models and demonstrate that profile-
based methods can be more accurate at identifying users than decision
trees when sufficient web activities are observed, and can achieve
higher efficiency than Support Vector Machines. The comparisons
demonstrate that profile-based methods for user identification pro-
vide a viable and simple alternative to this problem.
User identification based on behavioral information can be applied in
various situations. It can be directly applied to situations where enough
distinctive information about the users is available. Such situations
could include small to medium sized web sites, intranets and envi-
ronments with shared computers. Sometimes user identification is the
ultimate goal and sometimes it is an intermediate goal to help achieve
better personalization and targeting. Even though the data set we used
in this paper is user-centric (a richer source for researching web user
behavior [33]), the same idea can be applied to data collected by a
web site as well. The site-centric data has very detailed behavioral
information about pages users visited within the site. If a web site is able
to capture enough information about its users, the site can adopt the
same method of profiling to capture the strength of users' behavioral
patterns. If a site can identify a user who is not explicitly signed in, there
may be opportunities for targeted recommendations. When the scale of
a site gets large, which makes identification based solely on behavioral
information infeasible, behavioral patterns can be combined with other
tracking tools to enhance performance (see the Conclusion section
for more detailed discussion).
There are also potential client-side applications that can benefit
directly from profiling user-centric data. First, affiliated web sites
can share data among themselves (e.g. Windows Live ID, originally
Microsoft Passport, is based on similar ideas of sharing information
among affiliated web sites). User profiles across these affiliated sites can
certainly help them coordinate product recommendations. Second,
users may opt-in to download client-side software from a trusted third
party that will track client-side activity to build user identification
1
A web session is a commonly used unit of analyzing web user behavior. It contains
a list of consecutive URLs visited. Typically, industry heuristics draw session
boundaries if the time difference between consecutive clicks exceeds a chosen
threshold, say 30 min [36].
models. Such models may be used to provide behavioral authentication
services on behalf of the user. Other potential client-side or user-centric
applications can also be found in existing research [14,15,29].
The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, we introduced a
simple, yet powerful method for generating user profiles from web
usage data. The profiles capture the strength of user behavioral patterns.
We conducted systematic experiments to compare the performance
of the profile-based approach and the classification models, and have
found good results. Second, this paper is among the first to study
user behavior patterns in web usage data for the purpose of user
identification. We applied user profiles for a new application — user
identification, and proposed a framework for profiling and identifying
users. The framework was applied in the user-centric web browsing
context and was demonstrated to be effective at identifying users.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we survey
the research on user profiling and user identification. Section 3 formu-
lates the problem of using user profiles to identify users and describes
the detailed procedure for user profiling and user identification. In
Section 4, we extensively evaluate the proposed method using 140
sub-datasets derived from a large dataset that captures user-centric
web browsing activity. Finally, we discuss limitations and future work
in Section 5. We also include the procedures used to efficiently update
user profiles and user rankings in the Appendix.
2. User profiles and user identification
In the data mining community, user profiling is often studied in the
context of personalization [4,25] and fraud detection [7,13,18,19]. In
the information retrieval community, user profiles are used for per-
sonalized information retrieval or filtering [12,16,37].
Constructing accurate and comprehensive user profiles of indi-
vidual users is one of the key issues in developing personalization
applications. A user profile normally contains a list of variables [8,9]
and/or conjunctive rules (e.g. association rules [2,3] and classification
rules [6]). Ref. [4] studies user profiles as a set of rules. Their focus is on
rule validation since there are large numbers of rules discovered for
each user. Rules validated by experts serve as the user profiles. Instead
of just individual user profiles for personalization, there has also been
work on learning aggregate profiles, such as the work of Ref. [25],
which builds profiles that can apply across groups of users who may
have similar interests. They use clustering to generate aggregate user
profiles which are evaluated in the context of providing recommenda-
tions as an integrated part of a personalization engine. Rather than
learning profiles from click-stream data, Ref. [17] describes an
approach that unobtrusively monitors user activity on pages (such
as how much the user scrolls) to build profiles that capture user
interest in specific pages or content.
There is also other user profiling work based on web usage data that
is not associated with personalization. Ref. [27] generates user profiles
from various web log files of a web site. They assume that the owner of
the web site defines a list of topics and associates each web page with
one or more of these topics. A user profile is generated according to
the time the user spent on the web pages of different topics. Ref. [30]
generates profiles from server logs of a career web site. A user profile is
generated from the number of clicks on job openings. Ref. [34] builds a
rule-based web user profiling platform that can be applied to different
web services to generate user profiles from their usage data, and the
platform is not tied to any specific applications. None of the previous
research on user profiling using web usage data has considered user
identification based on user-centric data.
The use of profiles for fraud detection is crucial, since it is not
possible (in real time) to extract and analyze all the associated records
in order to detect a potentially fraudulent deviation in behavior. Using
profiles for fraud or intrusion detection is often studied in the context
of telecommunication and network intrusion. For fraud and intrusion
detection, profiles are used in two ways: in signature-based detection
 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271
methods, and in anomaly detection methods [9,10]. In signature-
based methods, a library of aberrant attack profiles (called signatures)
is stored in a signature data base. Profiles of user's recent traffic are
then compared to these signatures to detect fraudulent behavior. In
anomaly detection, the profile for each entity is itself the baseline for
comparison. A well formulated profile captures the typical behavior of
a user, allowing one to compare recent events to the appropriate
profile to ensure that the behavior is within the norm. New traffic for a
user is compared against their individual profile to determine if the
user's behavior has changed. A significant departure from the baseline
is a signal that the account may have been compromised [9]. The
profiling problem within the context of fraud detection was first
studied in Ref. [13] in the cellular phone industry. The call data is
organized by account, and each call record is labeled as fraudulent or
legitimate. The rule learning system is applied to an account's calls
and it produces a set of rules that serve to distinguish, within that
account, the fraudulent calls from the legitimate calls. The perfor-
mance of the system was compared with that of manual systems. Ref.
[18] also studies telecommunication fraud. They implement three
different variable-based user profiles and each profile's ability to
characterize user behavior in order to discriminate normal activities
from fraudulent ones is tested using feed-forward neural networks.
The evaluation schema in the fraud detection domain is more straight-
forward than that for personalization. The performance measurement
is simply the accuracy in identifying fraud in the testing data (both false
positive and false negative).
In the information retrieval context, a user profile takes into
account the feedback of the retrieval task, that is, the relevance of the
previously returned documents. Research in information retrieval is
now moving into a personalized scenario where a retrieval or filtering
system maintains a separate user profile for each user. In this context,
user profiles are often generated to capture users' feedback (both
explicit and implicit) to the retrieval results. Users can indicate
explicitly whether a retrieved document is relevant, or the retrieval
system can implicitly guess out the users' feedback based on users'
interaction with the documents (e.g. mouse and keyboard usage,
page, navigation, book-marking, and editing) [37]. Such profiles
often contain a list of words [12]. The evaluation is on the retrieval
performance. This type of profile is not the focus of this paper.
There is currently no research on building user behavioral profiles
from web usage data for the purpose of user identification. Previous
research on web user identification has mainly focused on using
tracking techniques such as cookies [20], web bugs [20], login [23] and
keys [23]. Ref. [1] also disclosed several ways of identifying users and
collecting demographic information and market information, including
branding a browser with a unique identification in each user request,
identifying a user by key strokes or mouse clicks, gathering demo-
graphic information using multiple datasets and by monitoring network
traffic. Very limited research is being done on analyzing web users'
behavior for user identification. Our previous research [28] sheds some
light on the possibilities of user identification based on users' web usage
behavior, and it demonstrates that users can be identified, to some
extent, based on their behavior if enough information is observed. In our
current research in this paper, we further investigate whether user
profiles can help to identify users based on their behavioral patterns.
Recently, with the widespread use of technology, there has been
substantial interest in identifying unique behavioral characteristics
that can possibly serve as identifiers in domains outside of web usage.
Ref. [26] shows that users have distinct mannerisms in which they use
computer keyboards, and that users have unique keystroke dynamics.
Ref. [11] extends this work to the use of mouse movements in
addition to keystroke dynamics, and they note that the combination
can often be used to uniquely identify humans. Ref. [22] shows that
authors have unique writing styles that enable identifying them from
text. In a similar vein, Ref. [21,35] shows that users have unique
writing patterns when they author content for online message boards.
263
3. Building user profiles for user identification
User identification through behavioral patterns is a new and
exciting area of research. In this paper, we propose a simple yet
powerful (as shown in the experiments) profile-based method for
user identification.
A general framework for user identification based on user profiles
is depicted in Fig. 1. User profiles are built from consecutive web
sessions with known user IDs. These profiles are used to predict the
owner of future anonymous web sessions (i.e. user identification). More
specifically, we assume a web browsing dataset containing N users U =
{u1,u2,…,uN}. We pick la time T as the present time. Before time T, user ui
has E(ui) number of web browsing sessions {eli,e2i ,…,eE(u) i }, where
ui ∈ {u1,u2,…,uN}. The sessions are ordered by time. The problem of
building user profiles for user identification is defined as learning the
profiles of users by using sessions observed before time T to help in
identifying users after time T, upon observing anonymous sessions.
At time T, upon observing the web activity (organized into labeled
web sessions with known user IDs) of N users (U = {u1,u2,…,uN}), the
user profile for user ui (for i = 1 to N) is constructed from user ui's web
sessions or together with other users' web sessions (Profiling Stage,
see Section 3.1). Looking forward from time T, a series of web sessions
coming from an anonymous user is observed. Based on the behavioral
patterns we observe from the list of new sessions, we estimate the
likelihood that these new sessions are generated by a certain user
(Identification Stage, see Section 3.2).
The curved arrows indicate that each component in the procedure
is dynamic. As new data comes in, we can update the present time T
and update the user profiles incorporating more recent data. When
time T and the user profiles are fixed, we can also update the user
rankings used for user identification as we observe more anonymous
sessions (see the Appendix for methods used to update user profile
and rankings efficiently). The users ranked on the top are the users
who are most likely generating the new anonymous sessions.
3.1. Profiling stage
The first stage in the procedure illustrated in Fig. 1 is to build user
profiles. We first construct user profiles based on the within-user
strength of behavioral patterns, then both the within-user strength
and the overall strength of behavioral patterns. Let Pall = {P1,P2,…,PK}
be the list of patterns we consider when building the profiles. K is
the number of candidate patterns considered. Below, we define the
within-user strength of a behavioral pattern.
Definition 1. Within-user pattern strength.
For user ui (for i = 1 to N), the within-user strength of a behavioral
∣ ∣
p
∣ ∣
Duji
pattern Pj (for i = 1 to K) is , where Dui is the number of sessions
Dui∣ ∣
∣ ∣
pj
from ui and Dui is the number of sessions from user ui that contain
behavioral pattern pj.
Fig. 1. The procedure of building user profiles for user identification.
264 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271
Fig. 2. Support-based profiling for user identification.
For a given user, the within-user strength of a behavioral pattern is
equivalent to the support of a pattern among all the sessions of this
user (i.e. the number of sessions containing this pattern divided by the
total number of sessions of a user).
Fig. 2 illustrates the profiling procedure that uses the within-user
strength of behavioral patterns (i.e. within-user support). For the rest
of the paper, we refer to this profiling method as the support-based
profiling method.
Steps 1–4 select the candidate patterns we use for building the
profiles. The candidate patterns are the union of the top X strongest
patterns from each user. For each user, we select the top X patterns with
the highest within-user strength, and then combine them together to
form the set of patterns we use later for building profiles. The rationale
behind this selection heuristic is that a pattern must be strong for at least
one out of the N users in order for it to be of interest. We use M1 to
discover the top patterns within each user. If we consider visiting a site
or combination of sites as the format of a pattern, M1 can be frequent
itemset discovery methods such as Apriori [2]. There can be various ways
to select candidate patterns depending on the format of the pattern.
Step 5 computes the within-user strength of all the candidate
patterns for every user, and user profiles are created. For each user, the
profile is a vector containing K = |Pall| numeric numbers, where |Pall| is
the number of candidate patterns. Each number in the profile
corresponds to the within-user strength of a candidate pattern. For
example, if the top patterns for user A are {cnn.com, yahoo.com, amazon.
com}, and the top patterns for user B are {msn.com, yahoo.com, myspace.
com}, then the patterns we consider when building profiles for both user
A and B are {cnn.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com, msn.com, myspace.
com}. For user A, the profile could look like (0.8, 0.6, 0.5, 0.01, 0), and the
profile for user B could be (0.01, 0.7, 0.03, 0.8, 0.6).
In the field of information retrieval, the term weighting function
known as IDF (Inverse-Document-Frequency) is widely used, usually
as part of a TF-IDF function. The intuition was that a term which
occurs in many documents is not a good discriminator, and should be
given less weight than one which occurs in few documents, and IDF
was a heuristic implementation of this intuition [32]. In data mining,
a corresponding term is lift. In the context of web user browsing
sessions, the lift of a pattern can be defined as the frequency of a
pattern within a user's sessions divided by the frequency of the
pattern across all users. A lift value greater than 1 indicates that a
pattern is more likely to happen for this user than expected. Because
IDF has been proven to be very successful in information retrieval, in
this paper, we will also investigate using lift of patterns to represent
user profiles, to see if it has any advantage over support.
Before presenting the profiling procedure based on lift, we first
need to define the overall strength of a pattern and the relative pattern
strength.
Definition 2. Overall pattern strength.
The overall strength of a behavioral pattern pj (for i = 1 to K) is
∣Dp ∣, where |D| is the total number of sessions from all users and Dp
j
j is
∣D∣
the number of sessions from all users that contain behavioral pattern pj.
Definition 3. Relative pattern strength.
For user ui (for i = 1 to N) and patterns pj (for j = 1 to K), the
relative strength of a behavioral pattern pj for user ui is
p
Duji = Dui
, ∣ ∣ ∣ ∣
Dpj = D ∣ ∣ ∣∣
pj
where |Du| is the number of sessions from ui, Dui is the number of ∣ ∣
sessions from user ui that have behavioral pattern pj, |Du| is the total
∣ ∣
number of sessions from all users and Dpj is the number of sessions
from all users that contain behavioral pattern pj.
For a given user, the relative strength of a behavioral pattern is
equivalent to the lift of a pattern2 (i.e. the support of the pattern
within this user divided by the support of the pattern across all users,
which is the same as the within-user strength of this pattern divided
by the overall strength of this pattern).
Fig. 3 below illustrates the profiling procedure using lift.
Similar to Fig. 2, Steps 1–4 select the candidate patterns for
building the profiles. Step 5 calculates the overall strength of the
candidate patterns. The overall strength of a given pattern is actually
the support of that pattern across all user sessions. Step 6 computes
the within-user strength of all candidate patterns for each user. In step
7, user profiles are created. Again, for each user, the profile is a vector
2
Lift is normally defined within the context of association rules. The lift of rule
A → C is defined as confidence ðA→C Þ
= supportðsupport
A∩C Þ = supportðAÞ
. Definition 3 is equivalent to
supportðC Þ ðC Þ
the lift of rule ui → pj.
 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271
Fig. 3. Lift-based profiling.
containing K = |Pall| numeric numbers. Each number in the profile
corresponds to the relative pattern strength of a candidate pattern.
3.2. Identification stage
The second stage in Fig. 1 is the user identification stage. In this
stage, the user profiles that were previously built are used to help in
identifying the owner of future sessions. User identification is based
on the difference between two profiles which is captured in the
distance function defined in Definition 4. The distance between two
profiles is defined as the Euclidean distance between two vectors.
Definition 4. Distance between two profiles.
For two profiles R1 = (a1s ,affiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
2 ,...,a K ) and ffi R2 = (b1,b2,...,bK), the
K   ranking can change dynamically as W (the number of newly observed
distance between R1 and R2 is ∑ aj −bj .
j=1
When new sessions are observed after time T, we assume that
these sessions are from the same anonymous user. Given this list of
sessions, we can use a similar method to calculate the support and lift
values of all the candidate patterns for that anonymous user. The
candidate patterns are still the ones generated based on all of the user
sessions before time T. The overall pattern strength used to calculate
the lift value is also calculated from all the user sessions observed
before time T. Since sessions coming from all N users are observed
before time T, the overall pattern strength calculated from sessions
before time T is more accurate. Also, since the new sessions after time
T are from the same user, it is unfeasible to compute the overall
pattern strength from the data after time T. Instead, in the iden-
tification stage, the within-user strength of all the candidate patterns
for the anonymous user is computed from the new sessions after time
T. The profile for that anonymous user is based on the within-user
strength calculated from sessions after time T and the overall pattern
strength calculated from sessions before time T. The user profiles
constructed for all the N users in the profiling stage are then compared
265
with the profile of this anonymous user to decide the identity of the
anonymous user.
Fig. 4 illustrates the detailed procedure for user identification,
based on relative pattern strength. The procedure based on within-
user pattern strength is similar, so we do not repeat it here (the
difference is explained at the end of Fig. 4).
Step 1 calculates the within-user strength of all the candidate
patterns for this anonymous user, based on newly observed sessions
from this anonymous user. In Step 2, the within-user strength is then
divided by the overall pattern strength computed before time T. This
forms the user profile (after time T) for this anonymous user. In Steps 3
and 4, this anonymous profile is compared with all of the user profiles
constructed from sessions before time T. Definition 4 is used to calculate
the distance between two profiles, and the users are ranked according to
the distance between their profiles and the anonymous profile. The
sessions) changes. This approach for identification is similar to the idea
of k-nearest neighbor with k being 1. If we were to assign a label to the
anonymous user, we would pick the profile with the smallest distance
and assign the user ID of that profile to the anonymous user. Of course,
we can also assign several user IDs to the anonymous user, with the
associated likelihood values based on the distance.
Over time, we observe more and more user activities, and so the
user profiles may change. In the Appendix, we provide a procedure to
update user profiles, based solely on incremental sessions. This
procedure allows us to calculate the updated user profiles without
looking at the sessions before time T, which can be much more
efficient. Also in the Appendix, we include a procedure to update user
rankings as we observe more anonymous sessions, when time T and
the user profiles are fixed.
4. Experiments
In this section, we discuss the data we use, the experimental
design and the results.
266 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271
Fig. 4. Identification procedure.
4.1. Data
User-centric data provides benefits in understanding user online
behavior for the following reason. Site-centric data represents an
incomplete picture of user behavior on the web because it does not
capture a user's activity on external sites. User-centric data, on the
other hand, is data collected at the user level, so it captures entire
histories of web surfing behavior for each user. The dataset that we
use was provided by a commercial data vendor and it captures the
web browsing history of a panel of users who volunteered to be
tracked in this manner. The data provided to us is the browsing
behavior of a sample of 50,000 users over one year.
The raw data has simple summary statistics for each web session,
specifically the name of the site visited, number of pages seen, the
starting time and duration of a session. In order to have adequate data
for testing (specifically in order to have enough number of sessions for
each user) and to have adequate features that can be constructed from
the data we adopt a user-centric perspective here, where a session is
one continuous period of user activities where a user may visit
multiple web sites.
Rather than running our method on the entire dataset, we create
multiple datasets by combining data from a specific number of users.
This enables us to explicitly study the effect of the number of users/
classes and to deal with data sparsity by selecting only those users for
whom enough data is available. Specifically, we create several sub-
datasets by combining sessions belonging to 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 75 and
100 different users.3 That is, for each such sub-dataset, the dependent
variable (user ID) may take 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 75 or 100 different values,
respectively. However, since each such sub-dataset represents only
one sample of a chosen set of users, we repeat the random selection
process twenty times to create 140 datasets. To each of those datasets,
we apply the two profiling methods as well as two classification
methods for comparison. There are three additional criteria that we
use when selecting the users, discussed below.
3
These numbers are chosen to reflect different scales (i.e. a few are in the lower
range (2, 5), some are in the intermediate range (10, 20, 50) and the rest are in the
higher range (e.g. 75, 100)).
First, each panelist in the sample represents a single computer that
is tracked; hence, we restrict our selection of users to those corre-
sponding to a household size of one in the household demographic file
provided. However, we note that this does not guarantee that only a
single “person” uses each computer.
Second, we need to sample users that have a sufficient level of
browsing activity such that we have enough out of sample data on
which the models can be tested. The larger the (minimum) number of
sessions per user, the larger the training as well as the testing datasets
used. However, using a higher value may bias the sample toward
users who are particularly active online. In the experiments here, we
use 300 sessions as the minimum cutoff (i.e. we choose users who
have at least 300 sessions in the data).
Third, when a given number of users are selected, the priors in the
data are unequal to start with. For instance, when constructing a
dataset of three users, the number of sessions for each user may be
300, 600 and 2100, resulting in class priors of 0.1, 0.2 and 0.7
respectively. A naïve classifier predicting the most frequent class will
start with an accuracy of 70%. To avoid this from introducing any
accuracy bias, we select the same number of sessions for all of the
users selected in any given sub-dataset. In the previous example, this
would mean selecting the first 300 sessions for each user. Since the
original sessions are ordered by time, the sessions selected in this
manner will still be ordered by time. This guarantees exactly equal
class priors. For example, a 20 user dataset would have exactly 5%
class priors for all the classes. Note that this would mean having to
ignore the later sessions of some of the users selected.
After the user screening process, we have 2798 qualified users. We
then randomly select sessions from these users to form the sub-datasets
as discussed earlier. Each sub-dataset is then split into a training set
and a validation set. For each user in a sub-dataset, we keep the first 2/3
of their sessions in the training dataset (data before time T) and the last
1/3 of the sessions in the validation dataset (data after time T).
4.2. Experimental design
For each of the 140 sub-datasets, we implement three methods to
predict user IDs (identify users) — the support-based profiling method,
 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271 267

Fig. 5. Experiment procedure.

the lift-based profiling method and the classification method. User
profiles are constructed using all of the user sessions in the training set
(corresponding to all the sessions before time T in Fig. 1), and are then
used to predict user IDs in the validation set (sessions after time T in
Fig. 1). In the identification stage, the number of sessions observed (the
sliding window size) is changed. We use 10 different sliding window
sizes, 1, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100, to investigate how
sliding window size affects the predictive accuracy. Each sliding
window contains multiple sessions. The number of sessions contained
in a sliding window is the size of the sliding window. For each session,
we observe all the web sites visited in that session. For multiple
sessions in a sliding window, we are able to compute the support and
lift of all the candidate patterns (selected using only the training set).
The sessions in a sliding window correspond to the new observed
sessions {e1,e2, ... , eW} mentioned in Fig. 4. For each sliding window, we
predict the user IDs using the two profiling methods and the
classification method.
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the profile-based method
for user identification, we also implement a classification method. We
choose weka's J4.8 (implementing C4.5 decision tree) as the classifier,
since classification trees in general have been shown to be highly
accurate classifiers, and it also works well with classification problems
that contain a large number of classes. Here, when we mix 100 users'
sessions together, the number of classes is 100. The specific choice of
weka is also for convenience, since weka is an open-source data
mining platform that lends itself easily to automation within scripts.
We also take the sliding window approach in creating different units
of analysis. But for the classification model, both the training set
and the validation set are preprocessed using the sliding window
approach, because the data records used for both training and vali-
dating the classification model should take the same format. Each data
point corresponds to a sliding window containing multiple sessions.
And the features for the classification model are the support of the
candidate patterns within a sliding window. There are K different
features, corresponding to the support of the K candidate patterns.
We then compare the two profile-based methods and the sliding
window-based classification method to see which one achieves higher
predictive accuracy under different settings (varying the number of

Table 1
Predictive accuracy for the three methods (in percentages).

Sliding window size

# of users 1 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

2 89.01 98.13 94.29 95.89 98.68 95.33 92.51 94.77 93.19 90.87 88.56
87.65 94.93 95.84 95.51 95.64 95.82 95.86 96.47 95.69 95.43 95.29
89.80 98.61 98.93 99.18 99.18 99.20 99.21 99.19 99.18 99.25 99.30
5 85.35 90.53 91.58 93.72 91.59 89.88 87.24 88.40 84.69 84.93 81.36
80.27 92.16 92.99 93.18 93.46 93.70 93.93 94.49 94.86 95.16 95.23
72.78 89.20 90.65 91.77 92.09 92.80 93.21 93.83 94.76 95.09 95.05
10 79.36 90.72 89.13 87.31 88.06 86.20 82.31 73.71 75.53 72.88 66.80
73.19 88.83 89.79 90.76 91.17 91.49 92.00 92.40 92.85 93.13 93.11
62.57 84.55 87.58 89.62 90.40 91.01 91.46 91.92 92.04 92.52 92.53
20 74.84 87.98 85.57 83.86 78.75 73.43 71.04 67.32 61.89 55.16 48.95
68.45 87.13 88.41 88.75 89.16 89.44 89.85 90.02 90.20 90.70 90.90
53.16 78.67 82.00 83.36 84.11 84.95 85.64 85.96 86.46 87.25 87.83
50 69.71 83.56 82.09 77.51 75.09 71.44 66.12 58.31 51.17 46.92 38.32
61.91 83.24 85.46 86.45 87.46 88.15 88.68 89.21 89.54 89.80 90.12
44.62 68.08 71.81 73.77 75.06 75.96 76.94 77.61 78.30 79.29 80.04
75 64.96 83.36 81.27 77.88 74.20 71.04 64.22 58.54 50.40 42.77 39.22
57.64 82.60 85.08 86.20 86.84 87.44 87.85 88.28 88.67 89.12 89.49
41.05 67.07 71.26 72.67 73.93 75.00 75.78 76.61 77.39 78.22 78.88
100 62.90 81.01 78.83 75.94 72.06 67.27 61.47 54.56 47.36 42.23 38.04
55.76 80.65 83.20 84.36 85.19 85.81 86.27 86.67 86.92 87.17 87.36
38.50 63.41 66.98 68.71 69.69 70.44 70.98 71.53 72.04 72.74 72.93

Note: in each cell, the first number is the accuracy for the classification model, the second number is for the support-based profiling method, and the third is for the lift-based
profiling method. The bold number indicates the highest accuracy in each cell.
268 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271

Table 2 highest relative improvement, as shown in Table 3, reaches 135.17%.

The method with the highest accuracy. When the sliding window size is small, the profiling method doesn't
Sliding window size show an advantage because not enough sessions are observed to
portray an accurate picture of a user's behavior. For higher numbers of
# of users 1 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
users, say 100, the support-based profiling method achieves accuracy
2 LP LP LP LP LP LP LP LP LP LP LP
as high as 87.36%. This is a dramatic increase from the baseline. For
5 C LP LP C SP SP SP SP SP SP SP
10 C C SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP example, when there are 100 users, the chance of guessing the correct
20 C C SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP user is only 1%. One implication of this result is that when enough
50 C C SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP sessions can be obtained, the profiling method is the best choice.
75 C C SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP Otherwise, the classification model is better.
100 C C SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP SP
Figs. 6 and 7 illustrate the trend of the absolute accuracy
Note: C stands for classification; SP stands for support-based profile; LP stands for lift- improvement. As shown in Fig. 6, for all different numbers of users
based profile.
(each corresponding to a line in the Fig. 6), the trend is clear that the
improvement in accuracy increases with the size of the sliding window.
users and the size of the sliding window). For simplicity, the pattern The 3D surface in Fig. 7 shows that the profiling-based methods dem-
presentation we choose in the experiments is items. In this web onstrate more benefit as the number of users (the difficulty of the
browsing dataset, it is the web sites visited in a web session. problem) and the sliding window size (the amount of information
Fig. 5 illustrates the detailed steps used in the experiments. available) increase.
In the experiment, we pick the top 10 web sites (X in Figs. 2 and 3) We also compared our methods with Support Vector Machines
from each user and union them to form the set of candidate patterns. (SVMs), which has been shown to be highly accurate in classification
We also did the experiments setting X to 20 and 30, but the higher X [24]. While the accuracy improvement was not significant, our
did not contribute to significantly higher accuracy. methods achieve higher efficiency than SVMs as illustrated in Figs. 8
and 9. The x-axis is the number of users, and the y-axis is the runtime
4.3. Evaluation results in seconds. We compare the time taken by SVM and the sum of the
time taken by two profile methods (SUM_profile). The comparisons
Table 1 reports the accuracy of these three methods, varying the with both decision trees and SVMs demonstrate that profile-based
number of users and the size of the sliding window. Each number is the methods for user identification provide a viable and simple alternative
average of 20 runs. Table 2 lists the method with the best performance to this problem.
within each cell. Table 3 shows both the absolute and relative im-
provement of the best profiling method over the classification model. 5. Conclusions
As shown in Tables 1, 2 and 3, the support-based profiling method
significantly dominates the classification model when the size of the In this paper, we propose an approach to build user profiles that
sliding window gets larger and the number of users increases. The lift- can be used to identify users. Our experiments show that this
based profiling method performs best when the number of users is approach can be highly effective and efficient. This paper is among the
small. The classification model performs best when the sliding first to study user behavior patterns in web usage data for the purpose
window size is small. In the cells where the classification method of user identification. As discussed in the introduction, there are many
performs the best, the difference in performance between the classi- potential applications for this approach. Once the profiles are proven
fication model and the profile-based method is small (lower left to be effective at user identification, they can be further utilized for
corner in Table 3). But the advantage that the profile-based method other applications such as targeted advertising, product recommen-
has over the classification model gets much larger as the size of the dation and fraud detection.
sliding window grows (lower right corner in Table 3). Also, as the While it is a simple yet powerful approach, it also has some
number of users increases, the decrease in accuracy for the profiling simplifying assumptions and limitations. (a) As time changes, users'
method is not as dramatic when the sliding window size increases behavioral patterns may change. Even though we have considered
(e.g. for sliding window size 100, the accuracy decreases from 95.29% updating user profiles as discussed in the Appendix, we have a fixed
to 87.36% for the support-based profiling method, but the accuracy set of candidate patterns. Essentially, this set of patterns can also
decreases from 88.56% to 38.04% for the classification method). The evolve over time. Moreover, more recent behavior can play a more

Table 3
Accuracy improvement (profile-based vs. classification method).

Sliding window size

# of users 1 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

2 0.79 0.48 4.64 3.29 0.50 3.87 6.70 4.42 5.99 8.38 10.74
0.89 0.49 4.92 3.43 0.51 4.06 7.25 4.66 6.43 9.22 12.13
5 −5.09 1.63 1.41 − 0.54 1.88 3.82 6.69 6.08 10.17 10.23 13.86
−5.96 1.81 1.54 − 0.58 2.05 4.25 7.67 6.88 12.01 12.05 17.04
10 −6.17 − 1.90 0.66 3.44 3.10 5.29 9.69 18.69 17.32 20.25 26.31
−7.78 −2.09 0.74 3.94 3.52 6.13 11.77 25.36 22.93 27.78 39.39
20 −6.39 −0.85 2.83 4.90 10.41 16.02 18.81 22.70 28.31 35.54 41.95
−8.53 − 0.97 3.31 5.84 13.22 21.81 26.48 33.73 45.74 64.44 85.70
50 −7.80 − 0.32 3.38 8.94 12.37 16.71 22.56 30.90 38.37 42.88 51.80
−11.19 − 0.38 4.11 11.53 16.48 23.39 34.12 52.98 74.98 91.39 135.17
75 − 7.32 − 0.77 3.81 8.32 12.64 16.41 23.62 29.74 38.28 46.36 50.27
−11.27 − 0.92 4.68 10.69 17.04 23.10 36.78 50.81 75.95 108.40 128.19
100 − 7.14 − 0.36 4.37 8.42 13.13 18.54 24.80 32.11 39.57 44.94 49.32
−11.35 − 0.44 5.54 11.08 18.22 27.56 40.34 58.85 83.55 106.40 129.64

Note: in each cell, the first number is the absolute accuracy improvement of the best profiling method over the classification model, and the second number is the relative accuracy
improvement (both in percentages).
 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271
Fig. 6. Accuracy improvement with sliding window size.
important role in determining what a user's future behavior is like. In
future work, more weight can be placed on most recent activities to
take this into consideration. (b) The approach works well in situations
where there are many repeated visitors. On sites where occasional
users dominate, and a majority of the users do not login, it might be
more beneficial to assign users to various groups based on their
behavior instead of attempting to uniquely identify them. (c) In the
identification stage, we assume that the sessions we observe after
time T are from the same anonymous user. There needs to be methods
(e.g. IP addresses or cookies) to connect consecutive sessions. In cases
where this assumption does not hold, identification can only be done
on fairly short periods of web activities, which can be quite difficult.
(d) Because of the difficulty in obtaining online fraud data where one
logs in using someone else's identity, we cannot directly test the
effectiveness of the method on fraud detection. But the results in
user identification can shed some light on the application of fraud
detection, and the method can be slightly modified in the identifica-
tion stage to detect fraud. (e) In our experiments, the maximum
number of users in each sub-dataset is 100. Since we were not able to
extend the experiments to much larger number of users, we cannot
conclude that our method can be applied to large scale problems.
Therefore, we should either restrict our method to small and medium
sized applications or convert the problem itself to manageable scale
(see more discussions about this in the Introduction and the future
work below).
In the future, this work can be extended in several directions.
(a) More experiments can be conducted to further investigate the
conditions under which the profile-based method or a certain
Fig. 7. Accuracy improvement with sliding window size and number of users.
269
Fig. 8. Runtime in seconds (#users 2–100).
classification model works the best. This is always a difficult problem,
but some insights can be of value. (b) When data is available, the
approach can be applied to more applications, such as fraud detection
and product recommendation. (c) In large scale problems with huge
number of users, when direct user identification based on behavioral
patterns alone becomes infeasible (e.g. due to lack of sufficient
information to distinguish users), behavioral features can be com-
bined with other tools to help identify users. For example, for a large
online retailer, several user accounts may share the same IP address
(e.g. members of the same family). The retailer might be able to
identify the members sharing the same IP address (assuming that
there is some known login information from this IP address which can
be used to build user profiles). Being able to further identify users
within the shared IP address can help achieve high performance for
personalization. Another solution for the large scale problem is to
focus on segment level instead of individual level. The problem can
be converted into a segment identification or segment assignment
problem. One such approach is to first cluster users into different
segments based on profile similarities. Future unknown users can be
assigned to the segment that has the highest profile similarity. While
the segment-based solution for large scale problems is not proven in
this paper, it remains a viable research question in our future work.
Fig. 9. Runtime in seconds (#users 2–20).
270 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271

Appendix A

Fig. 1A. Updating user profiles.

Fig. 2A. Updating user rankings.

 Y.(C.) Yang / Decision Support Systems 49 (2010) 261–271
A.1. Updating user profiles
Over time, we observe more and more user activity, and the
individual user profiles may change. The procedure in Fig. 1A updates
user profiles based solely on incremental sessions. This procedure
allows us to calculate the updated user profiles without looking at the
sessions before time T. Here, we only provide the update procedure for
lift-based profiling, since the update procedure for support-based
profiling is similar.
Once the user profiles before time T are calculated, we simply need
to incorporate the new sessions between time T and T1 into the old
user profiles in order to generate the updated user profiles at time T1.
We do not need to follow the profiling algorithm in Fig. 3 and we do
not need to use any session before time T. This can be much more
efficient.
The set of candidate patterns Pall does not require frequent updates.
It can be updated when there are significant amount of additional
sessions that need to be considered for generating candidate patterns.
A.2. Updating user rankings
Again, we use time T as the present time. As we observe more and
more sessions from an anonymous user after time T, we are able to
update the user rankings using the procedure in Fig. 2A. Again, Fig. 2A
is based on lift, and the updating procedure based on support can be
easily derived, so we do not include the details here.
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Yinghui (Catherine) Yang is an assistant professor of the
Graduate School of Management at University of California,
Davis. She received her Ph.D. in Operations and Information
management from The Wharton School at the University of
Pennsylvania, and B.E. in Management Information Systems
from The School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua
University. Her research is interdisciplinary between data
mining and marketing. Her research has been published in
top data mining journals (e.g. IEEE Transactions on Knowl-
edge and Data Engineering) and Marketing journals (e.g.
Marketing Science).