Estimating/forecasting download completion time

Question

We\'ve all poked fun at the \'X minutes remaining\' dialog which seems to be too simplistic, but how can we improve it?

Effectively, the input is the set of downloa

Answer 1

I wonder, would a state estimation technique produce good results here? Something like a Kalman Filter?

Basically you predict the future by looking at your current model, and change the model at each time step to reflect the changes to the real world. I think this kind of technique is used for estimating the time left on your laptop battery, which can also vary according to use, age of battery, etc'.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter for a more in depth description of the algorithm.

The filter also gives a variance measure, which could be used to indicate your confidence of the estimate (allthough, as was mentioned by other answers, it might not be the best idea to show this to the end user)

Does anyone know if this is actually used somewhere for download (or file copy) estimation?