Robust dynamic classes revealed by measuring the response function of a social system
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Date
2008-10-14
Publication Type
Journal Article
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Abstract
We study the relaxation response of a social system after endogenous and exogenous bursts of activity using the time series of daily views for nearly 5 million videos on YouTube. We find that most activity can be described accurately as a Poisson process. However, we also find hundreds of thousands of examples in which a burst of activity is followed by an ubiquitous power-law relaxation governing the timing of views. We find that these relaxation exponents cluster into three distinct classes and allow for the classification of collective human dynamics. This is consistent with an epidemic model on a social network containing two ingredients: a power-law distribution of waiting times between cause and action and an epidemic cascade of actions becoming the cause of future actions. This model is a conceptual extension of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem to social systems [Ruelle, D (2004) Phys Today 57:48–53] and [Roehner BM, et al., (2004) Int J Mod Phys C 15:809–834], and provides a unique framework for the investigation of timing in complex systems.
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published
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Volume
105 (41)
Pages / Article No.
15649 - 15653
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
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Subject
complex systems; human dynamics
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03738 - Sornette, Didier (emeritus) / Sornette, Didier (emeritus)