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arXiv · 1502.03224

Emergent user behavior on Twitter modelled by a stochastic differential equation

Anders Mollgaard·Joachim Mathiesen
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Abstract

Data from the social-media site, Twitter, is used to study the fluctuations in tweet rates of brand names. The tweet rates are the result of a strongly correlated user behavior, which leads to bursty collective dynamics with a characteristic 1/f noise. Here we use the aggregated "user interest" in a brand name to model collective human dynamics by a stochastic differential equation with multiplicative noise. The model is supported by a detailed analysis of the tweet rate fluctuations and it reproduces both the exact bursty dynamics found in the data and the 1/f noise.

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Anders Mollgaard, Joachim Mathiesen. 2015-02-11. Emergent user behavior on Twitter modelled by a stochastic differential equation. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0123876

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