Context mining and integration into predictive web analytics

Predictive Web Analytics is aimed at understanding behavioural patterns of users of various web-based applications: e-commerce, ubiquitous and mobile computing, and computational advertising. Within these applications business decisions often rely on two types of predictions: an overall or particular user segment demand predictions and individualised recommendations for visitors. Visitor behaviour is inherently sensitive to the context, which can be defined as a collection of external factors. Context-awareness allows integrating external explanatory information into the learning process and adapting user behaviour accordingly. The importance of context-awareness has been recognised by researchers and practitioners in many disciplines, including recommendation systems, information retrieval, personalisation, data mining, and marketing. We focus on studying ways of context discovery and its integration into predictive analytics.