Visual health subject directory analysis based on users' traversal activities

Concerns about health issues cover a wide spectrum. Consumer health information, which has become more available on the Internet, plays an extremely important role in addressing these concerns. A subject directory as an information organization and browsing mechanism is widely used in consumer health‐related Websites. In this study we employed the information visualization technique Self‐Organizing Map (SOM) in combination with a new U‐matrix algorithm to analyze health subject clusters through a Web transaction log. An experimental study was conducted to test the proposed methods. The findings show that the clusters identified from the same cells based on path‐length‐1 outperformed both the clusters from the adjacent cells based on path‐length‐1 and the clusters from the same cells based on path‐length‐2 in the visual SOM display. The U‐matrix method successfully distinguished the irrelevant subjects situated in the adjacent cells with different colors in the SOM display. The findings of this study lead to a better understanding of the health‐related subject relationship from the users' traversal perspective.