Chapter 1 New Trends in Web User Behaviour Analysis Pablo E. Rom´ an, Juan D. Vel´ asquez, Vasile Palade, and Lakhmi C. Jain Abstract. The analysis of human behaviour has been conducted within diverse disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, marketing and computer science. Hence, a broad theoretical framework is available, with a high potential for application into other areas, in particular to the analysis of web user browsing behaviour. The above mentioned disciplines use surveys and experimental sampling for testing and calibrating their theoretical models. With respect to web user browsing behaviour, the major source of data is the web logs, which store ev- ery visitor’s action on a web site. Such files could contain millions of registers, de- pending on the web site traffic, and represents a major data source about human behaviour. This chapter surveys the new trends in analysing web user behaviour and revises some novel approaches, such as those based on the neurophysiologicaltheory of decision making, for describing what web users are looking for in a web site. 1.1 Introduction Since early times of civilization, humanity has faced the challenge of understanding itself. Traders anticipate peoples’ needs, politics calculates the move with the best Pablo E. Rom´ an · Juan D. Vel´ asquez Web Intelligence Consortium, Chile Research Centre, Department of Industrial Engineering School of Engineering and Science, University of Chile, Av. Rep´ ublica 701, Santiago, Chile, P.C. 837-0720 e-mail: proman@ing.uchile.cl, jvelasqu@dii.uchile.cl Vasile Palade Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, UK, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK e-mail: vasile.palade@cs.ox.ac.uk Lakhmi C. Jain KES Centre, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Mawson Lakes Campus, South Australia SA 5095, Australia e-mail: lakhmi@unisa.edu.au J.D. Vel´ asquez et al. (Eds.): Advanced Techniques in Web Intelligence-2, SCI 452, pp. 1–10. springerlink.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013