Web mining based on Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Maps: Analysis of a real citizen web portal

This work is focused on the usage analysis of a citizen web portal, Infoville XXI (http://www.infoville.es) by means of Self-Organizing Maps (SOM). In this paper, a variant of the classical SOM has been used, the so-called Growing Hierarchical SOM (GHSOM). The GHSOM is able to find an optimal architecture of the SOM in a few iterations. There are also other variants which allow to find an optimal architecture, but they tend to need a long time for training, especially in the case of complex data sets. Another relevant contribution of the paper is the new visualization of the patterns in the hierarchical structure. Results show that GHSOM is a powerful and versatile tool to extract relevant and straightforward knowledge from the vast amount of information involved in a real citizen web portal.