Circadian pattern and burstiness in mobile phone communication

TL;DR

This study investigates the origins of bursty communication patterns in mobile phone data, demonstrating that circadian and weekly cycles do not fully explain the heavy-tailed inter-event times, which are likely due to human task execution behaviors.

Contribution

The paper introduces systematic de-seasoning methods to separate circadian effects from human task execution, revealing the latter's significant role in burstiness.

Findings

Heavy tails persist after removing circadian and weekly patterns.

Circadian and weekly cycles are not the sole causes of burstiness.

Human task execution behavior contributes to communication burstiness.

Abstract

The temporal communication patterns of human individuals are known to be inhomogeneous or bursty, which is reflected as the heavy tail behavior in the inter-event time distribution. As the cause of such bursty behavior two main mechanisms have been suggested: a) Inhomogeneities due to the circadian and weekly activity patterns and b) inhomogeneities rooted in human task execution behavior. Here we investigate the roles of these mechanisms by developing and then applying systematic de-seasoning methods to remove the circadian and weekly patterns from the time-series of mobile phone communication events of individuals. We find that the heavy tails in the inter-event time distributions remain robustly with respect to this procedure, which clearly indicates that the human task execution based mechanism is a possible cause for the remaining burstiness in temporal mobile phone communication patterns.