A Simple Generative Model of Collective Online Behaviour

Abstract

Human activities increasingly take place in online environments, providing novel opportunities for relating individual behaviours to population-level outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a simple generative model for the collective behaviour of millions of social networking site users who are deciding between different software applications. Our model incorporates two distinct components: one is associated with recent decisions of users, and the other reflects the cumulative popularity of each application. Importantly, although various combinations of the two mechanisms yield long-time behaviour that is consistent with data, the only models that reproduce the observed temporal dynamics are those that strongly emphasize the recent popularity of applications over their cumulative popularity. This demonstrates---even when using purely observational data without experimental design---that temporal data-driven modelling can effectively distinguish between competing microscopic mechanisms, allowing us to uncover new aspects of collective online behaviour.

Updated, with new figures and Supplementary Information

References in corpus (12)

• Quantifying Long-Term Scientific Impact
• Novelty and Collective Attention
• A Poissonian explanation for heavy-tails in e-mail communication
• Collaborative Tagging and Semiotic Dynamics
• Sandpile on Scale-Free Networks
• Competition-induced criticality in a model of meme popularity
• Scale-free network growth by ranking
• Modeling and Predicting Popularity Dynamics via Reinforced Poisson Processes
• Exact Solution for the Time Evolution of Network Rewiring Models
• What Stops Social Epidemics?
• Attention and Visibility in an Information Rich World
• Limited Attention and Centrality in Social Networks

Cited by in corpus (25)

• Unification of theoretical approaches for epidemic spreading on complex networks
• Coevolution spreading in complex networks
• Suppressing disease spreading by using information diffusion on multiplex networks
• The limitations of discrete-time approaches to continuous-time contagion dynamics
• The effects of network structure, competition and memory time on social spreading phenomena
• Growing complex network of citations of scientific papers -- measurements and modeling
• Hipsters on Networks: How a Small Group of Individuals Can Lead to an Anti-Establishment Majority
• Preferential attachment mechanism of complex network growth: "rich-gets-richer" or "fit-gets-richer"?
• Cross correlations of the American baby names
• Branching process descriptions of information cascades on Twitter
• Spreading of Memes on Multiplex Networks
• A multi-type branching process method for modelling complex contagion on clustered networks
• Dynamics and Biases of Online Attention: The Case of Aircraft Crashes
• Digital Ecology: Coexistence and Domination among Interacting Networks
• Complex Contagions with Timers
• Growth and Containment of a Hierarchical Criminal Network
• Power-law ansatz in complex systems: excessive loss of information
• Integrating sentiment and social structure to determine preference alignments: The Irish Marriage Referendum
• Rising Novelties on Evolving Networks: Recent Behavior Dominant and Non-Dominant Model
• A model for meme popularity growth in social networking systems based on biological principle and human interest dynamics
• The Message or the Messenger? Inferring Virality and Diffusion Structure from Online Petition Signature Data
• On the dual nature of adoption processes in complex networks
• Emergence of Scaling in Complex Substitutive Systems
• Neutral evolution and turnover over centuries of English word popularity
• Perturbative expansion of the fundamental equation of online user dynamics for describing changes in eigenfrequencies