Individual-driven versus interaction-driven burstiness in human dynamics: The case of Wikipedia edit history.

Jeehye Choi,Takayuki Hiraoka,Hang-Hyun Jo

doi:10.1103/physreve.104.014312

Jeehye Choi, Takayuki Hiraoka + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.104.014312

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Abstract

The origin of non-Poissonian or bursty temporal patterns observed in various data sets for human social dynamics has been extensively studied, yet its understanding still remains incomplete. Considering the fact that humans are social beings, a fundamental question arises: Is the bursty human dynamics dominated by individual characteristics or by interaction between individuals? In this paper we address this question by analyzing the Wikipedia edit history to see how spontaneous individual editors are in initiating bursty periods of editing, i.e., individual-driven burstiness, and to what extent such editors' behaviors are driven by interaction with other editors in those periods, i.e., interaction-driven burstiness. We quantify the degree of initiative (DoI) of an editor of interest in each Wikipedia article by using the statistics of bursty periods containing the editor's edits. The integrated value of the DoI over all relevant timescales reveals which is dominant between individual-driven and interaction-driven burstiness. We empirically find that this value tends to be larger for weaker temporal correlations in the editor's editing behavior and/or stronger editorial correlations. These empirical findings are successfully confirmed by deriving an analytic form of the DoI from a model capturing the essential features of the edit sequence. Thus our approach provides a deeper insight into the origin and underlying mechanisms of bursts in human social dynamics.

Highlights

Since the seminal paper by Barabási [1], the origin of bursty temporal patterns in human dynamics has been extensively debated for the last few decades
II we describe our approach for analyzing the edit sequences of Wikipedia articles by means of bursty periods, the degree of initiative, and the area under the curve
Considering the fact that humans are social beings, one can ask the fundamental question of whether the bursty human dynamics is dominated by the characteristics of individuals or by the interaction between them

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Since the seminal paper by Barabási [1], the origin of bursty temporal patterns in human dynamics has been extensively debated for the last few decades (see the review book [2] and references therein). By analyzing the edit sequences of Wikipedia articles we aim to understand the role of individuals in the bursty collective dynamics by looking at how spontaneous individual editors are in initiating bursty periods of editing and to what extent such editors’ behaviors are driven by interaction with other editors in those periods. These questions can be formulated in terms of individual-driven burstiness versus interaction-driven burstiness, which can be seen as an elaboration of the issue on node burstiness versus link burstiness.

Data set

Degree of initiative

Area under the DoI curve

Findings

CONCLUSION