A stochastic evolutionary model for capturing human dynamics

Abstract

The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in various contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the dynamics of survival analysis, traditionally employed in clinical trials and reliability analysis in engineering. We derive a general solution for the model in the form of a product, and then a continuous approximation to the solution via the renewal equation describing age-structured population dynamics. This enables us to model a wide range of survival distributions, according to the choice of the mortality distribution. We provide empirical evidence for the validity of the model from a longitudinal data set of popular search engine queries over 114 months, showing that the survival function of these queries is closely matched by the solution for our model with power-law mortality.

14 pages, 5 tables. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1401.5957

References in corpus (6)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Sociophysics: A review of Galam models
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• Excitable human dynamics driven by extrinsic events in massive communities
• The statistical laws of popularity: Universal properties of the box office dynamics of motion pictures
• A stochastic evolutionary model for survival dynamics

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