A Neuro-fuzzy approach for user behaviour classification and prediction

Abstract Big data and cloud computing technology appeared on the scene as new trends due to the rapid growth of social media usage over the last decade. Big data represent the immense volume of complex data that show more details about behaviours, activities, and events that occur around the world. As a result, big data analytics needs to access diverse types of resources within a decreased response time to produce accurate and stable business experimentation that could help make brilliant decisions for organizations in real-time. These developments have spurred a revolutionary transformation in research, inventions, and business marketing. User behaviour analysis for classification and prediction is one of the hottest topics in data science. This type of analysis is performed for several purposes, such as finding users’ interests about a product (for marketing, e-commerce, etc.) or toward an event (elections, championships, etc.) and observing suspicious activities (security and privacy) based on their traits over the Internet. In this paper, a neuro-fuzzy approach for the classification and prediction of user behaviour is proposed. A dataset, composed of users’ temporal logs containing three types of information, namely, local machine, network and web usage logs, is targeted. To complement the analysis, each user’s 360-degree feedback is also utilized. Various rules have been implemented to address the company’s policy for determining the precise behaviour of a user, which could be helpful in managerial decisions. For prediction, a Gaussian Radial Basis Function Neural Network (GRBF-NN) is trained based on the example set generated by a Fuzzy Rule Based System (FRBS) and the 360-degree feedback of the user. The results are obtained and compared with other state-of-the-art schemes in the literature, and the scheme is found to be promising in terms of classification as well as prediction accuracy.