Empirical Findings in Human Bursty Dynamics

Abstract

In this Chapter we will present a comprehensive collection of a large number of empirical observations of human bursty behaviour in several datasets recorded in various situations. We divide these observations into two categories, i.e., individual activities and interaction-driven collective activities . In addition we also briefly discuss examples of human mobility , financial systems, and animal behaviour . Precisely, as for the interaction-driven case, we sort out the empirical findings from different social interaction modalities like face-to-face interactions , mobile-phone based interactions, communication by posted letters and emails to web-based social interactions, as they may reflect the different degree of sociality between a pair of individuals. To make the overview easier for a reader to follow such a large set of empirical studies, we present a systematic summary of all these observations in tables including a short description of each dataset, the observed values of some bursty characters, and the references to the original works.