Measuring the Visual Complexities of Web Pages

Visual complexities (VisComs) of Web pages significantly affect user experience, and automatic evaluation can facilitate a large number of Web-based applications. The construction of a model for measuring the VisComs of Web pages requires the extraction of typical features and learning based on labeled Web pages. However, as far as the authors are aware, little headway has been made on measuring VisCom in Web mining and machine learning. The present article provides a new approach combining Web mining techniques and machine learning algorithms for measuring the VisComs of Web pages. The structure of a Web page is first analyzed, and the layout is then extracted. Using a Web page as a semistructured image, three classes of features are extracted to construct a feature vector. The feature vector is fed into a learned measuring function to calculate the VisCom of the page. In the proposed approach of the present study, the type of the measuring function and its learning depend on the quantification strategy for VisCom. Aside from using a category and a score to represent VisCom as existing work, this study presents a new strategy utilizing a distribution to quantify the VisCom of a Web page. Empirical evaluation suggests the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of both features and learning algorithms.