Survey of User Modeling Techniques with Specific Emphasis on Considering Demographic Attributes

Users demographic attributes like age, gender location etc. plays an essential role in todays web applications. Previous research shows that there is relationship between users browsing behavior and their basic characteristics. In this paper we discuss various Data Mining and machine learning approaches for modeling and prediction of demographic characteristics. Data mining and machine learning techniques have the ability to handle large amounts of data and to process uncertainty. These characteristics make these techniques suitable for automatic generation of user models that simulate human decision making. The paper also represents guidelines that show which techniques may be used more efficiently according to the task implemented by the application.