Aggregate Characterization of User Behavior in Twitter and Analysis of the Retweet Graph

Abstract

Most previous analysis of Twitter user behavior is focused on individual information cascades and the social followers graph. We instead study aggregate user behavior and the retweet graph with a focus on quantitative descriptions. We find that the lifetime tweet distribution is a type-II discrete Weibull stemming from a power law hazard function, the tweet rate distribution, although asymptotically power law, exhibits a lognormal cutoff over finite sample intervals, and the inter-tweet interval distribution is power law with exponential cutoff. The retweet graph is small-world and scale-free, like the social graph, but is less disassortative and has much stronger clustering. These differences are consistent with it better capturing the real-world social relationships of and trust between users. Beyond just understanding and modeling human communication patterns and social networks, applications for alternative, decentralized microblogging systems-both predicting real-word performance and detecting spam-are discussed.

17 pages, 21 figures

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