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Cited by 269

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Evidence for a bimodal distribution in human communication

Open access
Wu, Ye, Zhou, Changsong, Xiao, Jinghua, Kurths, Jürgen, Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim·2010·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

Interacting human activities underlie the patterns of many social, technological, and economic phenomena. Here we present clear empirical evidence from Short Message correspondence that observed human actions are the result of the interplay of three basic ingredients: Poisson initiation of tasks and decision making for task execution in individual humans as well as interaction among individuals. This interplay leads to new types of interevent time distribution, neither completely Poisson nor power-law, but a bimodal combination of them. We show that the events can be separated into independent bursts which are generated by frequent mutual interactions in short times following random initiations of communications in longer times by the individuals. We introduce a minimal model of two interacting priority queues incorporating the three basic ingredients which fits well the distributions using the parameters extracted from the empirical data. The model can also embrace a range of realistic social interacting systems such as e-mail and letter communications when taking the time scale of processing into account. Our findings provide insight into various human activities both at the individual and network level. Our analysis and modeling of bimodal activity in human communication from the viewpoint of the interplay between processes of different time scales is likely to shed light on bimodal phenomena in other complex systems, such as interevent times in earthquakes, rainfall, forest fire, and economic systems, etc.

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Metadata

Authors
Wu, Y., Zhou, C., Xiao, J., Kurths, J., & Schellnhuber, H. J.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2010-10-19
Volume
107
Issue
44
Pages
18803-18808
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
OpenAlex
W1972019869
Cited by
269
References
29
FWCI
54.54
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Evidence for a bimodal distribution in human communication. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1013140107
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Wu, Y., Zhou, C., Xiao, J., Kurths, J., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2010). Evidence for a bimodal distribution in human communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1013140107

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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