Circadian pattern and burstiness in mobile phone communication

Abstract

The temporal communication patterns of human individuals are known to be inhomogeneous or bursty, which is reflected as heavy tail behavior in the inter-event time distribution. As the cause of such a bursty behavior two main mechanisms have been suggested: (i) inhomogeneities due to the circadian and weekly activity patterns and (ii) inhomogeneities rooted in human task execution behavior. In this paper, we investigate the role of these mechanisms by developing and then applying systematic de-seasoning methods to remove the circadian and weekly patterns from the time series of mobile phone communication events of individuals. We find that the heavy tails in the interevent time distributions remain robust with respect to this procedure, which clearly indicates that the human task execution-based mechanism is a possible cause of the remaining burstiness in temporal mobile phone communication patterns. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.