Analyzing and modeling heterogeneous behavior

Zhiting Lin, Xiaoqing Wu, Dongyue He, Qiang Zhu and Jixiang Ni

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 450, issue C, 287-293

Abstract: Recently, it was pointed out that the non-Poisson statistics with heavy tail existed in many scenarios of human behaviors. But most of these studies claimed that power-law characterized diverse aspects of human mobility patterns. In this paper, we suggest that human behavior may not be driven by identical mechanisms and can be modeled as a Semi-Markov Modulated Process. To verify our suggestion and model, we analyzed a total of 1,619,934 records of library visitations (including undergraduate and graduate students). It is found that the distribution of visitation intervals is well fitted with three sections of lines instead of the traditional power law distribution in log–log scale. The results confirm that some human behaviors cannot be simply expressed as power law or any other simple functions. At the same time, we divided the data into groups and extracted period bursty events. Through careful analysis in different groups, we drew a conclusion that aggregate behavior might be composed of heterogeneous behaviors, and even the behaviors of the same type tended to be different in different period. The aggregate behavior is supposed to be formed by “heterogeneous groups”. We performed a series of experiments. Simulation results showed that we just needed to set up two states Semi-Markov Modulated Process to construct proper representation of heterogeneous behavior.

Keywords: Semi-Markov Modulated Process; Library visitation; Heterogeneous group (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437116000583
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:450:y:2016:i:c:p:287-293

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2016.01.019

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().