Exploring Wikipedia clickstream data

Description

Wikipedia regularly releases clickstream datasets that capture aggregated page-to-page user visits to Wikipedia articles. These datasets are very large, and while standard statistical methods can be used to get traffic volume statistics and top visited articles, they leave out the insights contained in the interconnections between the Wikipedia articles.
In this project, we use network analysis to derive the insights from the connections in the data. We model the clickstream data as a graph/network, describe the resulting graph and its most influential nodes, conduct community detection and natural language processing analyses to identify any themes/topics within the clickstream data, and use network shell decomposition to investigate obscure browsing on Wikipedia.

Results

The initial findings are described in this blogpost, along with the visualizations.

Visualizations

for the December 2018 clickstream data

• An interactive viz of Wikipedia traffic breakdown by type
• A network/graph viz of Wikipedia articles interconnected by the clickstream traffic between them
• An interactive viz of the article communities graph
• An interactive viz of the article communities graph with highlighting by topic terms

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Analysis steps

1. Data quality analysis of available datasets

• Jupyter notebook on NBViewer: data_quality_analysis.ipynb
  • Key takeaway from this notebook: data cleaning steps and notes on further processing
  • can run on local machine

2. Exploratory data analysis of the English Wikipedia clickstream dataset for December 2018

• data: the English Wikipedia clickstream dataset for December 2018
• Jupyter notebook on NBViewer: English_Wikipedia_EDA.ipynb
  • can run on local machine
• Visualization demo: Wikipedia clickstream traffic breakdown by type

3. Graph modeling and data import to neo4j

• data: the English Wikipedia clickstream dataset for December 2018
• Jupyter notebook on NBViewer: English_Wikipedia_graph_modeling_AWS.ipynb
  • run on AWS EC2 (the data may be too large to run on local)

4. Network analysis of the English Wikipedia clickstream

• data: the English Wikipedia clickstream dataset for December 2018
• Jupyter notebook on NBViewer: English_Wikipedia_network_analysis_AWS.ipynb
  • run on AWS EC2 (the data may be too large to run on local)

5. Defining community topics with NLP

• data: the English Wikipedia clickstream dataset for December 2018
• Jupyter notebook on NBViewer: English_Wikipedia_NLP_AWS.ipynb
  • run on AWS EC2 (the data may be too large to run on local)

6. Exploring obscure browsing on Wikipedia

• data: the English Wikipedia clickstream dataset for December 2018
• Jupyter notebook on NBViewer: English_Wikipedia_deepWiki.ipynb
  • was run on AWS EC2, but after the neo4j data pull the rest of the code is fine to run on local