Relative clock demonstrates the endogenous heterogeneity of human dynamics

Abstract

The heavy-tailed inter-event time distributions are widely observed in many human-activated systems, which may result from both endogenous mechanisms like the highest-priority-first protocol and exogenous factors like the varying global activity versus time. To distinguish the effects on temporal statistics from different mechanisms is this of theoretical significance. In this Letter, we propose a new timing method by using a relative clock, where the time length between two consecutive events of an individual is counted as the number of other individuals' events appeared during this interval. We propose a model, in which agents act either in a constant rate or with a power-law inter-event time distribution, and the global activity either keeps unchanged or varies periodically versus time. Our analysis shows that the heavy tails caused by the heterogeneity of global activity can be eliminated by setting the relative clock, yet the heterogeneity due to real individual behaviors still exists. We perform extensive experiments on four large-scale systems, the search engine by AOL, a social bookmarking system--Delicious, a short-message communication network, and a microblogging system--Twitter. Strong heterogeneity and clear seasonality of global activity are observed, but the heavy tails cannot be eliminated by using the relative clock. Our results suggest the existence of endogenous heterogeneity of human dynamics.