Relative clock demonstrates the endogenous heterogeneity of human dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a relative clock method to distinguish endogenous human behavioral heterogeneity from effects caused by global activity variations, revealing persistent individual-level heterogeneity despite accounting for external activity fluctuations.

Contribution

The study proposes a novel relative clock approach and a model to separate endogenous from exogenous effects in human activity patterns, supported by extensive empirical analysis.

Findings

Heavy tails from global activity heterogeneity can be removed by the relative clock.

Endogenous heterogeneity in individual behavior persists despite external activity fluctuations.

Global activity shows strong seasonality across different large-scale systems.

Abstract

The heavy-tailed inter-event time distributions are widely observed in many human-activated systems, which may result from both endogenous mechanisms like the highest-priority-first protocol and exogenous factors like the varying global activity versus time. To distinguish the effects on temporal statistics from different mechanisms is this of theoretical significance. In this Letter, we propose a new timing method by using a relative clock, where the time length between two consecutive events of an individual is counted as the number of other individuals' events appeared during this interval. We propose a model, in which agents act either in a constant rate or with a power-law inter-event time distribution, and the global activity either keeps unchanged or varies periodically versus time. Our analysis shows that the heavy tails caused by the heterogeneity of global activity can be eliminated by setting the relative clock, yet the heterogeneity due to real individual behaviors still exists. We perform extensive experiments on four large-scale systems, the search engine by AOL, a social bookmarking system--Delicious, a short-message communication network, and a microblogging system--Twitter. Strong heterogeneity and clear seasonality of global activity are observed, but the heavy tails cannot be eliminated by using the relative clock. Our results suggest the existence of endogenous heterogeneity of human dynamics.