Role of Activity in Human Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper investigates how individual activity levels influence the power-law patterns in human behavior, specifically in movie ratings and mobile communication, revealing a universal role of activity in societal dynamics.

Contribution

It provides a systematic empirical analysis linking individual activity to power-law distributions in human temporal behavior, highlighting a universal aspect across different social activities.

Findings

Higher activity correlates with steeper power-law exponents.

Individual interevent times follow heavy-tailed distributions.

Activity significantly influences society-level human behavior patterns.

Abstract

The human society is a very complex system; still, there are several non-trivial, general features. One type of them is the presence of power-law distributed quantities in temporal statistics. In this Letter, we focus on the origin of power-laws in rating of movies. We present a systematic empirical exploration of the time between two consecutive ratings of movies (the interevent time). At an aggregate level, we find a monotonous relation between the activity of individuals and the power-law exponent of the interevent-time distribution. At an individual level, we observe a heavy-tailed distribution for each user, as well as a negative correlation between the activity and the width of the distribution. We support these findings by a similar data set from mobile phone text-message communication. Our results demonstrate a significant role of the activity of individuals on the society-level patterns of human behavior. We believe this is a common character in the interest-driven human dynamics, corresponding to (but different from) the universality classes of task-driven dynamics.