Modeling and predicting temporal patterns of web content changes

Abstract

The technologies aimed at Web content discovery, retrieval and management face the compelling need of coping with its highly dynamic nature coupled with complex user interactions. This paper analyzes the temporal patterns of the content changes of three major news websites with the objective of modeling and predicting their dynamics. It has been observed that changes are characterized by a time dependent behavior with large fluctuations and significant differences across hours and days. To explain this behavior, we represent the change patterns as time series. The trend and seasonal components of the observed time series capture the weekly and daily periodicity, whereas the irregular components take into account the remaining fluctuations. Models based on trigonometric polynomials and ARMA components accurately reproduce the dynamics of the empirical change patterns and provide extrapolations into the future to be used for forecasting.