Pre-sending Documents on the WWW: A Comparative Study

David W. Albrecht, Ingrid Zukerman, Ann E. Nicholson

Abstract: Users' waiting time for information on the WWW may be reduced by pre-sending 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 pre-sending documents based on the predictions made by this model. We introduce two evaluation methods which measure the immediate and the eventual benefit of pre-sending a document. We use these evaluation methods to compare the performance of our decision-theoretic policy to that of a naive pre-sending policy, and to identify the domain parameter configurations for which each of these policies provides a clear overall benefit to the user.