  Edge-caching is recognized as an efficient technique for future cellular
networks to improve network capacity and user-perceived quality of experience.
To enhance the performance of caching systems, designing an accurate content
request prediction algorithm plays an important role. In this paper, we develop
a flexible model, a Poisson regressor based on a Gaussian process, for the
content request distribution.
  The first important advantage of the proposed model is that it encourages the
already existing or seen contents with similar features to be correlated in the
feature space and therefore it acts as a regularizer for the estimation.
Second, it allows to predict the popularities of newly-added or unseen contents
whose statistical data is not available in advance. In order to learn the model
parameters, which yield the Poisson arrival rates or alternatively the content
\textit{popularities}, we invoke the Bayesian approach which is robust against
over-fitting.
  However, the resulting posterior distribution is analytically intractable to
compute. To tackle this, we apply a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to
approximate this distribution which is also asymptotically exact. Nevertheless,
the MCMC is computationally demanding especially when the number of contents is
large. Thus, we employ the Variational Bayes (VB) method as an alternative low
complexity solution. More specifically, the VB method addresses the
approximation of the posterior distribution through an optimization problem.
Subsequently, we present a fast block-coordinate descent algorithm to solve
this optimization problem. Finally, extensive simulation results both on
synthetic and real-world datasets are provided to show the accuracy of our
prediction algorithm and the cache hit ratio (CHR) gain compared to existing
methods from the literature.
