A Multiscale Survival Process for Modeling Human Activity Patterns

PLoS One. 2016 Mar 29;11(3):e0151473. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151473. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Human activity plays a central role in understanding large-scale social dynamics. It is well documented that individual activity pattern follows bursty dynamics characterized by heavy-tailed interevent time distributions. Here we study a large-scale online chatting dataset consisting of 5,549,570 users, finding that individual activity pattern varies with timescales whereas existing models only approximate empirical observations within a limited timescale. We propose a novel approach that models the intensity rate of an individual triggering an activity. We demonstrate that the model precisely captures corresponding human dynamics across multiple timescales over five orders of magnitudes. Our model also allows extracting the population heterogeneity of activity patterns, characterized by a set of individual-specific ingredients. Integrating our approach with social interactions leads to a wide range of implications.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Human Activities*
  • Humans
  • Internet
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Probability
  • Survival Analysis
  • Time Factors

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Program on Key Basic Research Project, No. 2015CB352300; National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 61370022, No. 61531006, No. 61472444 and No. 61210008; and International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of China, No. 2013DFG12870. The authors are thankful for the research fund of Tsinghua-Tencent Joint Laboratory for Internet Innovation Technology.