Session stitching using sequence fingerprinting for web page visits

摘要

The nature of people's web navigation has significantly changed in recent years. The advent of smartphones and other handheld devices has given rise to web users consulting websites with more than one device, or using a shared device. As a result, large volumes of seemingly disjoint data are available, which when analysed together can support decision-making. The task of identifying web sessions by linking such data back to a specific person, however, is hard. The idea of session stitching aims to overcome this by using machine learning inference to identify similar or identical users. Many such efforts use various demographic data or device-based features to train matching algorithms. However, often these variables are not available for every dataset or are recorded differently, making a streamlined setup difficult. Besides, they often result in vast feature spaces which are hard to use for actionable interpretation.