106,872 research outputs found
Scaling behavior of online human activity
The rapid development of Internet technology enables human explore the web
and record the traces of online activities. From the analysis of these
large-scale data sets (i.e. traces), we can get insights about dynamic behavior
of human activity. In this letter, the scaling behavior and complexity of human
activity in the e-commerce, such as music, book, and movie rating, are
comprehensively investigated by using detrended fluctuation analysis technique
and multiscale entropy method. Firstly, the interevent time series of rating
behaviors of these three type medias show the similar scaling property with
exponents ranging from 0.53 to 0.58, which implies that the collective
behaviors of rating media follow a process embodying self-similarity and
long-range correlation. Meanwhile, by dividing the users into three groups
based their activities (i.e., rating per unit time), we find that the scaling
exponents of interevent time series in three groups are different. Hence, these
results suggest the stronger long-range correlations exist in these collective
behaviors. Furthermore, their information complexities vary from three groups.
To explain the differences of the collective behaviors restricted to three
groups, we study the dynamic behavior of human activity at individual level,
and find that the dynamic behaviors of a few users have extremely small scaling
exponents associating with long-range anticorrelations. By comparing with the
interevent time distributions of four representative users, we can find that
the bimodal distributions may bring the extraordinary scaling behaviors. These
results of analyzing the online human activity in the e-commerce may not only
provide insights to understand its dynamic behaviors but also be applied to
acquire the potential economic interest
Excitable human dynamics driven by extrinsic events in massive communities
Using empirical data from a social media site (Twitter) and on trading
volumes of financial securities, we analyze the correlated human activity in
massive social organizations. The activity, typically excited by real-world
events and measured by the occurrence rate of international brand names and
trading volumes, is characterized by intermittent fluctuations with bursts of
high activity separated by quiescent periods. These fluctuations are broadly
distributed with an inverse cubic tail and have long-range temporal
correlations with a power spectrum. We describe the activity by a
stochastic point process and derive the distribution of activity levels from
the corresponding stochastic differential equation. The distribution and the
corresponding power spectrum are fully consistent with the empirical
observations.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure
The Spontaneous Emergence of Social Influence in Online Systems
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades
cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and
technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior
empirical work on the diffusion of innovations in spatial regions or social
networks has largely focused on the spread of one particular technology among a
subset of all potential adopters. It has also been difficult to determine
whether the observed collective behaviour is driven by natural influence
processes, or whether it follows external signals such as media or marketing
campaigns. Here, we choose an online context that allows us to study social
influence processes by tracking the popularity of a complete set of
applications installed by the user population of a social networking site, thus
capturing the behaviour of all individuals who can influence each other in this
context. By extending standard fluctuation scaling methods, we analyse the
collective behaviour induced by 100 million application installations, and show
that two distinct regimes of behaviour emerge in the system. Once applications
cross a particular threshold of popularity, social influence processes induce
highly correlated adoption behaviour among the users, which propels some of the
applications to extraordinary levels of popularity. Below this threshold, the
collective effect of social influence appears to vanish almost entirely in a
manner that has not been observed in the offline world. Our results demonstrate
that even when external signals are absent, social influence can spontaneously
assume an on-off nature in a digital environment. It remains to be seen whether
a similar outcome could be observed in the offline world if equivalent
experimental conditions could be replicated
Emotional persistence in online chatting communities
How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and
write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in
Internet relay channels, and found that user activity patterns follow known
power-law and stretched exponential distributions, indicating that online chat
activity is not different from other forms of communication. Analysing the
emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a
remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite
their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in
online chats, which results in a specific emotional "tone" of the channels. We
provide an agent-based model of emotional interaction, which recovers
qualitatively both the activity patterns in chatrooms and the emotional
persistence of users and channels. While our assumptions about agent's
emotional expressions are rooted in psychology, the model allows to test
different hypothesis regarding their emotional impact in online communication.Comment: 34 pages, 4 main and 12 supplementary figure
Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economical and social media activity
Scientific studies investigating laws and regularities of human behavior are
nowadays increasingly relying on the wealth of widely available digital
information produced by human social activity. In this paper we leverage big
data created by three different aspects of human activity (i.e., bank card
transactions, geotagged photographs and tweets) in Spain for quantifying city
attractiveness for the foreign visitors. An important finding of this papers is
a strong superlinear scaling of city attractiveness with its population size.
The observed scaling exponent stays nearly the same for different ways of
defining cities and for different data sources, emphasizing the robustness of
our finding. Temporal variation of the scaling exponent is also considered in
order to reveal seasonal patterns in the attractivenessComment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
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