Machine learning techniques to make computers easier to use

Identifying user-dependent information that can be automatically collected helps build a user model by which (1) to predict what the user wants to do next and (2) to do relevant preprocessing. Such information is often relational and is best represented by a set of directed graphs. A machine learning technique called graph-based induction (GBI) efficiently extracts regularities from such data, based on which a user-adaptive interface is built that can predict the next command, generate scripts and prefetch files in a multi task environment. The heart of GET is pairwise chunking. The paper shows how this simple mechanism applies to the top down induction of decision trees for nested attribute representation as well as finding frequently occurring patterns in a graph. The results clearly shows that the dependency analysis of computational processes activated by the user commands which is made possible by GBI is indeed useful to build a behavior model and increase prediction accuracy. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.