T2 : E-Commerce and Clickstream Mining

Ronny Kohavi, Blue Martini Software, Inc.
Jon Becher, Accrue Software, Inc.

Sites conducting electronic commerce or providing content can generate significant amounts of data that can help gain insight about the visitors, allowing for improved interactions through personalization. The tutorial reviews the value proposition for mining e-commerce and clickstream data, presents several case studies, and takes the attendees through possible architectures for data collection, warehousing, analysis, and closing of the loop back to the web site. We review data collection through web logs, sniffing, application server logging. We look at the advantages and disadvantages of building a data warehouse, and present implicit and explicit ways to "close the loop." Finally, we review the building blocks of successful solutions for analysis, including data transformations, reports, visualizations, OLAP, and mining algorithms.

Presenter Bios

Ronny Kohavi is the director of data mining at Blue Martini Software, where he heads the engineering group responsible for the data collection, analysis, reporting, and campaign management modules in the company's Customer Interaction System. Prior to joining Blue Martini, Kohavi managed the MineSet project, Silicon Graphics' award-winning product for data mining and visualization. He joined Silicon Graphics after getting a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Stanford University, where he led the MLC++ project, the Machine Learning library in C++ now used in MineSet and at Blue Martini Software. Kohavi received his BA from the Technion, Israel. He co-chaired KDD 99's industrial track with Jim Gray and the KDD Cup 2000 with Carla Brodley. He co-edited with Foster Provost the special issue of the journal Machine Learning on Applications of Machine Learning and the special issue of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal on Applications of Data Mining to Electronic Commerce (to appear in 2001). He is a member of the editorial board for the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal from its inception and served as a member of the editorial board for the journal of Machine Learning from 1997 to 1999.

Jonathan Becher is VP of Product Strategy and Business Development at Accrue Software, where he is responsible for defining the product direction for the leading scalable Web analysis solution. Becher joined Accrue from the acquisition of NeoVista Software in January 2000, where he was President, CEO, and co-founder. While at NeoVista, he was a principal designer of an enterprise-class knowledge discovery workbench and led the implementation of the retail industry's first supply chain optimization solution based on data mining. Prior to NeoVista, Becher led the Application Development and the Professional Services organizations at MasPar Computer Corporation where he defined and helped build multiple production data mining applications.

Earlier in his career, he was a senior software engineer at the MicroElectronics Center of North Carolina where he developed advanced pattern recognition systems. Becher holds a B.S. from the University of Virginia in computer engineering and an M.S. in computer science from Duke University.