Twitter Referral Behaviours on News Consumption with Ensemble Clustering of Click-Stream Data in Turkish Media
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Click-stream data, which comes with a massive volume generated by the human activities on the websites, has become a prominent feature to identify readers' characteristics by the newsrooms after the digitization of the news outlets. It is essential to have elastic architectures to process the streaming data, particularly for unprecedented traffic, enabling conducting more comprehensive analyses such as recommending mostly related articles to the readers. Although the nature of click-stream data has a similar logic within the websites, it has inherent limitations to recognize human behaviors when looking from a broad perspective, which brings the need of limiting the problem in niche areas. This study investigates the anonymized readers' click activities in the organizations' websites to identify news consumption patterns following referrals from Twitter, who incidentally reach but propensity is mainly the routed news content. The investigation is widened to a broad perspective by linking the log data with news content to enrich the insights rather than sticking into the web journey. The methodologies on ensemble cluster analysis with mixed-type embedding strategies are applied and compared to find similar reader groups and interests independent from time. Our results demonstrate that the quality of clustering mixed-type data set approaches to optimal internal validation scores when embedded by Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) and using consensus function as a key to access the most applicable hyper parameter configurations in the given ensemble rather than using consensus function results directly. Evaluation of the resulting clusters highlights specific clusters repeatedly present in the samples, which provide insights to the news organizations and overcome the degradation of the modeling behaviors due to the change in the interest over time.
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