Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 18: Social Networks

SOE 18.1: Talk

Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:15–11:30, MA 001

Emergent human behaviour on Twitter modelled by a stochastic differential equation — •Anders Mollgaard and Joachim Mathiesen — Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark

In the online era, humans are connected in real time on global scales. Local or seemingly local information is instantaneously shared across geographical boundaries. In particular, social media have become an important platform for the sharing of information and have allowed for detailed studies of the coherent behaviour of humans on a global scale. We have analysed data from the social-media site, Twitter, and used it to study fluctuations in tweet rates of brand names. These have been found to reveal strongly correlated human behaviour that leads to 1/f noise and bursty collective dynamics. Here we use a basic definition of aggregated "user interest" to model collective human dynamics by a stochastic differential equation with multiplicative noise. The model is supported by an analysis of tweet rate fluctuations and it reproduces both the bursty dynamics found in the data and the 1/f noise.
[1] Mathiesen, Joachim, et al. "Excitable human dynamics driven by extrinsic events in massive communities." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (2013): 17259-17262.
[2] Mollgaard, Anders, et al. "Emergent human behaviour on Twitter modelled by a stochastic differential equation." In print.