2007/11/30 by Xiao-Pu Han, Tao Zhou, Bing-Hong Wang
Physics and Astronomy · Psychology · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Mental Health Research Topics #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/10/7/073010
published as New J. Phys. 10 (2008) 073010 · 3 figures and 4 pages
arxiv created 2008/05/25 · openalex publication_date 2008/07/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Increasing recent empirical evidence indicates the extensive existence of heavy tails in the inter-event time distributions of various human behaviors. Based on the queuing theory, the Barabási model and its variations suggest the highest-priority-first protocol to be a potential origin of those heavy tails. However, some human activity patterns, also displaying heavy-tailed temporal statistics, could not be explained by a task-based mechanism. In this paper, different from the mainstream, we propose an interest-based model. Both the simulation and analysis indicate a power-law inter-event time distribution with exponent −1, which is in accordance with some empirical observations in human-initiated systems.