ASSOCIATION RULE RANKER FOR WEB SITE EMULATION

A method and apparatus that allows association rules defining URL-URL relationships, and URL-URL relationships that are strongly influenced by a web site's topology, to be identified and respectively qualified. Superfluous association rules may be separated from non-topology affected association rules and discounted as desired. The invention may be implemented in conjunction with a probalistic generative method used to model a web site and simulate the behavior of a visitor traversing the site. The invention further allows randomized web site visitor behavior to be separated into "interesting" and "uninteresting" behavior.