Pre-sending documents on the WWW: A comparative study

Users' waiting time for information on the WWW may be reduced by presending documents they are likely to request, albeit at a possible expense of additional transmission costs. In this paper, we describe a prediction model which anticipates the documents a user is likely to request next, and present a decision-theoretic approach for presending documents based on the predictions made by this model. We introduce two evaluation methods which measure the immediate and the eventual benefit of presending a document. We use these evaluation methods to compare the performance of our decision-theoretic policy to that of a naive presending policy, and to identify the domain parameter configurations for which each of these policies provides a clear overall benefit to the user.