Hidden scaling patterns and universality in written communication

Abstract

The temporal statistics exhibited by written correspondence appear to be media dependent, with features which have so far proven difficult to characterize. We explain the origin of these difficulties by disentangling the role of spontaneous activity from decision-based prioritizing processes in human dynamics, clocking all waiting times through each agent's "proper time" measured by activity. This unveils the same fundamental patterns in written communication across all media (letters, email, sms), with response times displaying truncated power-law behavior and average exponents near -3/2. When standard time is used, the response time probabilities are theoretically predicted to exhibit a bimodal character, which is empirically borne out by our newly collected years-long data on email. These perspectives on the temporal dynamics of human correspondence should aid in the analysis of interaction phenomena in general, including resource management, optimal pricing and routing, information sharing, and emergency handling.

New activity pattern in human interactive dynamics

“…4(b) gives the relative frequency plot for the fit of such curves by a normalized exponential function. We see the histogram is strongly peaked, confirming that the σ c i grow roughly exponentially with rank for the great majority of agents, and giving quantitative confirmation to the universality of the activity pattern of email writers revealed by Previous work [19,6,9,29,30,31,20,21,22,13] has analyzed various aspects of priority queueing in relation to written correspondence. Here we show how a simple model based on prioritization as in Ref.…”

“…by a 'proper time' parameter s ∈ N + counting an agent's outbound messages. This approach [13] disentangles from the overall time dynamics of writers the contributions due to their spontaneous pauses between messages, and helped uncover universal power-law features in the RT statistics on written correspondence when the s-clocking is utilized, rather than the usual t-clocking ( Fig. 1).…”

“…We utilize for our inquiry the database presented in Ref. [13] and briefly described below, which is the most complete long-term email dataset currently available in the literature. Our findings reveal a new universal behavioral patterns as well as new modeling effects, evidencing hitherto unknown universal aspects of human interaction.…”

Temporal pattern of online communication spike trains in spreading a scientific rumor: how often, who interacts with whom?

“…A crucial aspect of OSM and more generally of human behavior is the underlying complex dynamics [14][15][16][17]. The time series of user activities, e.g., posting a tweet and replying to a message, are quite distinct from uncorrelated (Poisson random) dynamics in the presence of burstiness [18][19][20], temporal correlations [6,21,22], and non-stationarity of human daily rhythm [23,24], which has significant implications.…”

Application of optimal data-based binning method to spatial analysis of ecological datasets

“…The present analysis should help inform future investigations of temporal or spatial features of different complex systems in ecology and human dynamics (Simini et al (2012); Formentin et al (2014); Sanli and Lambiotte (2015)).…”