A Temporally Heterogeneous Survival Framework with Application to Social Behavior Dynamics

Abstract

Social behavior dynamics is one of the central building blocks in understanding and modeling complex social dynamic phenomena, such as information spreading, opinion formation, and social mobilization. While a wide range of models for social behavior dynamics have been proposed in recent years, the essential ingredients and the minimum model for social behavior dynamics is still largely unanswered. Here, we find that human interaction behavior dynamics exhibit rich complexities over the response time dimension and natural time dimension by exploring a large scale social communication dataset. To tackle this challenge, we develop a temporal Heterogeneous Survival framework where the regularities in response time dimension and natural time dimension can be organically integrated. We apply our model in two online social communication datasets. Our model can successfully regenerate the interaction patterns in the social communication datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform other state-of-the-art baselines. Meanwhile, the learnt parameters and discovered statistical regularities can lead to multiple potential applications.