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Browsing session

As explained in The Well-Grounded Data Analyst

A browsing session is a period during which a user continuously interacts with a website or application.

A browsing session is a continuous period of interaction with a website or application. Treating nearby opened and closed events as one session supports user-level analysis of browsing behavior. section 12.5.2

Analyze sessions by extracting their start hour, inspecting overall distributions, and calculating each user’s most frequent browsing time. Preserve tied modes when no time deserves priority, while recognizing that duplicate user rows can skew distributions. section 12.5.2

From sessions to user features

A session-level dataset can yield start-hour distributions, categorical browsing-time features, app-category preferences, session counts, unique-app counts, and median session duration for user segmentation. section 12.5.2

sessions["hour"] = sessions["start"].dt.hour

(
    sessions["hour"]
    .value_counts()
    .sort_index()
    .plot(kind="bar")
)

Plot session start hours to reveal when browsing begins most often before comparing individual users’ habitual times. section 12.5.2

How The Well-Grounded Data Analyst covers it

How deep it goes
Explains temporal aggregation, tied modes, categorical encoding, and user metrics, but defers constructing sessions from raw events.
Examples
Uses start-hour plots, per-user modes, browsing-time categories, app categories, session counts, and median session duration.
What it assumes
Assumes an existing session-level DataFrame with user identifiers, timestamps, durations, and related event-derived fields.
What you can do after
Apply via pandas and plotting tools to summarize session timing and build user-level features for segmentation.
How it connects
Connects browsing sessions with event data, time series analysis, user behavior, categorical encoding, and user segmentation.
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Related concepts

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of The Well-Grounded Data Analyst. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.