  Proactive caching is an effective way to alleviate peak-hour traffic
congestion by prefetching popular contents at the wireless network edge. To
maximize the caching efficiency requires the knowledge of content popularity
profile, which however is often unavailable in advance. In this paper, we first
propose a new linear prediction model, named grouped linear model (GLM) to
estimate the future content requests based on historical data. Unlike many
existing works that assumed the static content popularity profile, our model
can adapt to the temporal variation of the content popularity in practical
systems due to the arrival of new contents and dynamics of user preference.
Based on the predicted content requests, we then propose a reinforcement
learning approach with model-free acceleration (RLMA) for online cache
replacement by taking into account both the cache hits and replacement cost.
This approach accelerates the learning process in non-stationary environment by
generating imaginary samples for Q-value updates. Numerical results based on
real-world traces show that the proposed prediction and learning based online
caching policy outperform all considered existing schemes.
