An intelligent web spider for online e-commerce data extraction

Abstract

The growing arenas of e-commerce has its impact on the inflation and CPI. Automated web scrappers or web spiders are softwares that can be used to extract data that is available online. The proposed work here uses a python based web scrapper to extract online price information through automated browsing using Html DOM tree based structure to extract the data rich and relevant data regions of a web page. Further the extracted data is cleaned, integrated into a homogenous form for short term inflation calculation forecasting of vegetables and fruits category and analysis purposes.