Preprocessing: A Prerequisite for Discovering Patterns in Web Usage Mining Process
Web log data is usually diverse and voluminous. This data must be assembled into a consistent, integrated and comprehensive view, in order to be used for pattern discovery. Without properly cleaning, transforming and structuring the data prior to the analysis, one cannot expect to find meaningful patterns. As in most data mining applications, data pre-processing involves removing and filtering redundant and irrelevant data, removing noise, transforming and resolving any inconsistencies. In this paper, a complete pre-processing methodology having merging, data cleaning, user/session identification and data formatting and summarization activities to improve the quality of data by reducing the quantity of data has been proposed.