User profiling for estimating printing performance

A system for computing a reference behavior for a new user comprising:

• a feature extractor for extracting features from usage data acquired for users of an associated set of shared devices;
• a role assignment component for assigning a user role profile to a new user based on features extracted from the new user's usage data, the user role profile associating the new user with at least one of a set of roles, the role assignment component employing a model learnt using features extracted from usage data of an initial set of users;
• a user quota component for computing a reference behavior for the new user based on the user role profile and the reference behaviors for roles in the set of roles;
• and
• a processor which implements at least one of the feature extractor, role assignment component, and user quota component.

A method for computing a printing quota for a user comprising:

• providing a model for predicting a user role profile for a user based on features extracted from the user's print job data, the user role profile associating the user with at least one of a set of roles, the model having been learned on features extracted from print job data acquired for a set of print jobs for each user in an initial set of multiple users;
• receiving a new user's usage data;
• with the trained model, predicting a user profile for the new user based on features extracted from the new user's usage data, the user profile assigning a probability to each of the roles in the set of roles;
• and
• with a processor, computing a printing quota for the new user based on the user role profile and reference quotas for each of the roles in the set of roles.