Session Boundary Detection for Association Rule Learning Using n-Gram Language Models
We present a statistical method using n-gram language models to identify session boundaries in a large collection of Livelink log data. The identified sessions are then used for association rule learning. Unlike the traditional ad hoc timeout method, which uses fixed time thresholds for session identification, our method uses an information theoretic approach that provides a natural technique for performing dynamic session identification. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated with respect to 4 different interestingness measures. We find that we obtain a significant improvement in each interestingness measure, ranging from a 26.6% to 39% improvement on average over the best results obtained with standard timeout methods.