期刊
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
卷 105, 期 47, 页码 18153-18158出版社
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0800332105
关键词
complex systems; human activity; hypothesis testing; point process
资金
- National Science Foundation (NSF) [DGE-9987577, DMS-0709212, SEE 0624318]
- W. M. Keck Foundation
Patterns of deliberate human activity and behavior are of utmost importance in areas as diverse as disease spread, resource allocation, and emergency response. Because of its widespread availability and use, e-mail correspondence provides an attractive proxy for studying human activity. Recently, it was reported that the probability density for the inter-event time T between consecutively sent e-mails decays asymptotically as tau(-alpha), with = alpha approximate to 1. The slower-than-exponential decay of the inter-event time distribution suggests that deliberate human activity is inherently non-Poissonian. Here, we demonstrate that the approximate power-law scaling of the inter-event time distribution is a consequence of circadian and weekly cycles of human activity. We propose a cascading nonhomogeneous Poisson process that explicitly integrates these periodic patterns in activity with an individual's tendency to continue participating in an activity. Using standard statistical techniques, we show that our model is consistent with the empirical data. Our findings may also provide insight into the origins of heavy-tailed distributions in other complex systems.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据