This is an excellent idea. With Referer logging, you can already
produce a "Markov model" for your Web site, giving transition
probabilities between pages. But it would be interesting to find
out just how independent link choices really are; i.e., once a user
gets to a page, how much does it matter where they came from? To
the extent that it matters, the Markov model is inaccurate.
> Given that more than one person can use a hostname (proxy
> servers, etc), there's no reliable way to exactly identify
> a unique person without implementing access control
Yes, and the statistics of access intervals don't help. Intervals
between requests from the same host seem to follow a combination of
two very distinct exponential distributions whose decay rates
differing by over an order of magnitude; presumably the long-term
exponential represents intervals between user sessions through the
same gateway host. But the problem with exponential distributions
is that the maximum probability occurs at zero, no matter how long-
or short-term they might be...
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Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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