Self-organization on social media: endo-exo bursts and baseline fluctuations
arXiv:1407.6447 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0109293
Abstract
A salient dynamic property of social media is bursting behavior. In this paper, we study bursting behavior in terms of the temporal relation between a preceding baseline fluctuation and the successive burst response using a frequency time series of 3,000 keywords on Twitter. We found that there is a fluctuation threshold up to which the burst size increases as the fluctuation increases and that above the threshold, there appears a variety of burst sizes. We call this threshold the critical threshold. Investigating this threshold in relation to endogenous bursts and exogenous bursts based on peak ratio and burst size reveals that the bursts below this threshold are endogenously caused and above this threshold, exogenous bursts emerge. Analysis of the 3,000 keywords shows that all the nouns have both endogenous and exogenous origins of bursts and that each keyword has a critical threshold in the baseline fluctuation value to distinguish between the two. Having a threshold for an input value for activating the system implies that Twitter is an excitable medium. These findings are useful for characterizing how excitable a keyword is on Twitter and could be used, for example, to predict the response to particular information on social media.
arXiv commentPresented at WebAL-1: Workshop on Artificial Life and the Web 2014 (arXiv:1406.2507)
References in corpus (8)
- Twitter mood predicts the stock market
- Temporal patterns of happiness and information in a global social network: Hedonometrics and Twitter
- Robust dynamic classes revealed by measuring the response function of a social system
- Modeling bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics
- Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data
- The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street
- Endogenous Versus Exogenous Shocks in Complex Networks: an Empirical Test Using Book Sale Ranking
- Traveling Trends: Social Butterflies or Frequent Fliers?