language: en

[To be presented at the AAAI/ICML 1998 Workshop on Predicting the Future: AI Approaches to Time-Series Analysis 1]

Predicting Sequences of User Actions

Brian D. Davison and Haym Hirsh
Department of Computer Science Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
New Brunswick, NJ 08903 USA
fdavison,hirshg@cs.rutgers.edu

Abstract People display regularities in almost everything they do. This paper proposes characteristics of an idealized algorithm that, when applied to sequences of user actions, would allow a user interface to adapt over time to an individual's pattern of use. We describe a simple predictive method with these characteristics and show its predictive accuracy on a large dataset of UNIX commands to be at least as good as others that have been considered, while using fewer computational and memory resources.

Motivation