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Register a new userA Simple Generative Model of Collective Online Behaviour
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Human activities increasingly take place in online environments, providing novel opportunities for relating individual behaviours to population-level outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a simple generative model for the collective behaviour of millions of social networking site users who are deciding between different software applications. Our model incorporates two distinct components: one is associated with recent decisions of users, and the other reflects the cumulative popularity of each application. Importantly, although various combinations of the two mechanisms yield long-time behaviour that is consistent with data, the only models that reproduce the observed temporal dynamics are those that strongly emphasize the recent popularity of applications over their cumulative popularity. This demonstrates---even when using purely observational data without experimental design---that temporal data-driven modelling can effectively distinguish between competing microscopic mechanisms, allowing us to uncover new aspects of collective online behaviour.
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We show that the eclectic Boogaloo extremist movement that is now rising to prominence in the U.S., has a hidden online mathematical order that is identical to ISIS during its early development, despite their stark ideological, geographical and cultural differences. The evolution of each across scales follows a single shockwave equation that accounts for individual heterogeneity in online interactions. This equation predicts how to disrupt the onset and flatten the curve of such online extremism by nudging its collective chemistry.
Many real-world networks known as attributed networks contain two types of information: topology information and node attributes. It is a challenging task on how to use these two types of information to explore structural regularities. In this paper, by characterizing potential relationship between link communities and node attributes, a principled statistical model named PSB_PG that generates link topology and node attributes is proposed. This model for generating links is based on the stochastic blockmodels following a Poisson distribution. Therefore, it is capable of detecting a wide range of network structures including community structures, bipartite structures and other mixture structures. The model for generating node attributes assumes that node attributes are high dimensional and sparse and also follow a Poisson distribution. This makes the model be uniform and the model parameters can be directly estimated by expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Experimental results on artificial networks and real networks containing various structures have shown that the proposed model PSB_PG is not only competitive with the state-of-the-art models, but also provides good semantic interpretation for each community via the learned relationship between the community and its related attributes.
Using a random 10% sample of tweets authored from 2019-09-01 through 2020-04-30, we analyze the dynamic behavior of words (1-grams) used on Twitter to describe the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Across 24 languages, we find two distinct dynamic regimes: One characterizing the rise and subsequent collapse in collective attention to the initial Coronavirus outbreak in late January, and a second that represents March COVID-19-related discourse. Aggregating countries by dominant language use, we find that volatility in the first dynamic regime is associated with future volatility in new cases of COVID-19 roughly three weeks (average 22.49 $pm$ 3.26 days) later. Our results suggest that surveillance of change in usage of epidemiology-related words on social media may be useful in forecasting later change in disease case numbers, but we emphasize that our current findings are not causal or necessarily predictive.
Language can exert a strong influence on human behaviour. In experimental studies, it is for example well-known that the framing of an experiment or priming at the beginning of an experiment can alter participants behaviour. However, few studies have been conducted to determine why framing or priming specific words can alter peoples behaviour. Here, we show that the behaviour of participants in a game-theoretical experiment is driven mainly by social norms, and that participants adherence to different social norms is influenced by the exposure to economic terminology. To explore how these terminology-driven changes impact behavior at the system level, we use established frameworks for modeling collective cooperative behaviour. We find that economic terminology induces a behavioural difference which is larger than that caused by financial incentives in the magnitude usually employed in experiments and simulation. These findings place an increased responsibility on scientists and science communicators, as scientific terminology is increasingly communicated to the general population.
Recent empirical research has shown that links between groups reinforce individuals within groups to adopt cooperative behaviour. Moreover, links between networks may induce cascading failures, competitive percolation, or contribute to efficient transportation. Here we show that there in fact exists an intermediate fraction of links between groups that is optimal for the evolution of cooperation in the prisoners dilemma game. We consider individual groups with regular, random, and scale-free topology, and study their different combinations to reveal that an intermediate interdependence optimally facilitates the spreading of cooperative behaviour between groups. Excessive between-group links simply unify the two groups and make them act as one, while too rare between-group links preclude a useful information flow between the two groups. Interestingly, we find that between-group links are more likely to connect two cooperators than in-group links, thus supporting the conclusion that they are of paramount importance.
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