Abstract
A better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying complex human dynamics is of major interest in contemporary social research. Over the last few years, researchers have made huge strides towards this understanding, thanks especially to the increasing availability of datasets containing digital traces of many human activities. In this work, we investigate Web browsing trajectories using a human mobility approach based on approximately four years of browsing history data. Our findings strongly suggest that return visitation patterns in browsing behaviors and in human mobility exhibit very similar scaling properties. Moreover, we classify Web users as returners and explorers based on their on-line activities, and show that at a population level, the distribution of both profiles agrees with empirical observations in human mobility. Finally, we create a network representation of the most popular websites from the aggregated browsing trajectories and uncover many functional clusters related with different users’ activities.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The browsing history data is provided by the Web History Repository project http://webhistoryproject.blogspot.com/.
- 2.
- 3.
For more details on the structure of the browsing history, visit http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox_3_History_File_Format.
- 4.
Ekisto: an interactive visualization of online communities http://ekisto.sq.ro/.
References
Clauset, A., Shalizi, C.R., Newman, M.E.J.: Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Rev. 51(4), 661–703 (2009)
Albert, R., Barabási, A.-L.: Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Rev. Mod. Phys. 74(1), 47–97 (2002). Jan
Brockmann, D., Hufnagel, L., Geisel, T.: The scaling laws of human travel. Nature 439(7075), 462–465 (2006)
González, M.C., Hidalgo, C.A., Barabási, A.-L.: Understanding individual human mobility patterns. Nature 453(7196), 479–482 (2008)
Song, C., Koren, T., Wang, P., Barabási, A.-L.: Modelling the scaling properties of human mobility. Nat. Phys. 6(10), 818–823 (2010)
Szell, M., Sinatra, R., Petri, G., Thurner, S., Latora, V.: Understanding mobility in a social petri dish. Sci. Rep. 2, 1–6 (2012)
Brockmann, D.: Statistical mechanics: the physics of where to go. Nat. Phys. 6, 720–721 (2010)
Barabási, A.-L., Albert, R., Jeong, H.: Mean-field theory for scale-free random networks. Phys. A: Stat. Mech. Appl., 1–19 (1999)
Krapivsky, P., Redner, S.: Network growth by copying. Phys. Rev. E 71(3), 036118 (2005). Mar
Dorogovtsev, S.N., Mendes, J.F., Samukhin, A.N.: Structure of growing networks with preferential linking. Phys. Rev. Lett. 85(21), 4633–4636 (2000)
Simkin, M.V., Roychowdhury, V.P.: Do copied citations create renowned papers? Ann. Improb. Res. 11(1), 24–27 (2005). Jan
Barabási, A.-L.: The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. Nature (2005)
Vázquez, A., Oliveira, J.G., Dezsö, Z., Goh, K.I., Kondor, I., Barabási, A.-L.: Modeling bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. Phys. Rev. E 73(3), 036127 (2006)
Thiemann, C., Theis, F., Grady, D., Brune, R., Brockmann, D.: The structure of borders in a small world. PloS One 5(11), e15422 (2010). Jan
Zhao, K., Musolesi, M., Hui, P., Rao, W., Tarkoma, S.: Explaining the power-law distribution of human mobility through transportation modality decomposition. Sci. Rep. 5, 9136 (2015)
Pappalardo, L., Simini, F., Rinzivillo, S., Pedreschi, D., Giannotti, F., Barabási, A.-L.: Returners and explorers dichotomy in human mobility. Nat. Commun. 6, 8166 (2015)
Grabowicz, P.A., Ramasco, J.J., Gonçalves, B., Eguíluz, V.M.: Entangling mobility and interactions in social media. PloS One, 1–16 (2014)
Cho, E., Myers, S.A., Leskovec, J.: Friendship and mobility. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining—KDD ’11. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA (2011), p. 1082
Fruchterman, T.M.J., Reingold, E.M.: Graph Drawing by Force-directed Placement. Softw.-Pract. Exp. 21(November), 1129–1164 (1991)
Hasan, S., Schneider, C.M., Ukkusuri, S.V., González, M.C.: Spatiotemporal patterns of urban human mobility. J. Stat. Phys. 151, 304–318 (2012)
Krumme, C., Llorente, A., Cebrian, M., Pentland, A.S., Moro, E.: The predictability of consumer visitation patterns. Sci. Rep. 3, 1645 (2013)
Peixoto, T.P.: Hierarchical block structures and high-resolution model selection in large networks. Phys. Rev. X 4(1), 011047 (2014)
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the partial support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant No. 1152306. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barbosa, H.S., de Lima Neto, F.B., Evsukoff, A., Menezes, R. (2016). Returners and Explorers Dichotomy in Web Browsing Behavior—A Human Mobility Approach. In: Cherifi, H., Gonçalves, B., Menezes, R., Sinatra, R. (eds) Complex Networks VII. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 644. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30569-1_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30569-1_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30568-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30569-1
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)