Human Activity Patterns

First published: 2007

Brief summary

Nature paper on bursts and heavy tails in human communication activity.

Article

The study examines the timing of human communication and argues that many activities occur in bursts separated by long intervals rather than at a constant random rate. Such timing produces heavy-tailed distributions of waiting times between consecutive actions.

The authors analyse records of written correspondence and electronic communication across different historical periods. They compare the observed intervals with models in which individuals prioritise tasks instead of selecting actions with equal probability.

A priority-based queue can generate short clusters of activity when important tasks are handled rapidly, while lower-priority tasks remain pending for much longer. This mechanism produces highly uneven activity patterns without requiring a regular periodic cycle.

The findings distinguish burstiness from simple daily or weekly seasonality. They suggest that the ordering of decisions and tasks can contribute to long-tailed temporal patterns, although communication systems, populations and measurement methods differ across the datasets.

Source details and credits

• Source / publisher: Nature
• Source type: Research article
• URL type: WWW
• Credits: Nature
• URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06393