Scale-dependent power law properties in hashtag usage time series of Weibo

Abstract

We analyze the time series of hashtag numbers of social media data. We observe that the usage distribution of hashtags is characterized by a fat-tailed distribution with a size-dependent power law exponent and we find that there is a clear dependency between the growth rate distributions of hashtags and size of hashtags usage. We propose a generalized random multiplicative process model with a theory that explains the size dependency of the fat-tailed distribution. Numerical simulations show that our model reproduces these size-dependent properties nicely. We expect that our model is useful for understanding the mechanism of fat-tailed distributions in various fields of science and technology.