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KDD
2009
ACM

Characterizing individual communication patterns

14 years 4 months ago
Characterizing individual communication patterns
The increasing availability of electronic communication data, such as that arising from e-mail exchange, presents social and information scientists with new possibilities for characterizing individual behavior and, by extension, identifying latent structure in human populations. Here, we propose a model of individual e-mail communication that is sufficiently rich to capture meaningful variability across individuals, while remaining simple enough to be interpretable. We show that the model, a cascading non-homogeneous Poisson process, can be formulated as a double-chain hidden Markov model, allowing us to use an efficient inference algorithm to estimate the model parameters from observed data. We then apply this model to two e-mail data sets consisting of 404 and 6,164 users, respectively, that were collected from two universities in different countries and years. We find that the resulting best-estimate parameter distributions for both data sets are surprisingly similar, indicating th...
R. Dean Malmgren, Jake M. Hofman, Luis A. N. Amara
Added 25 Nov 2009
Updated 25 Nov 2009
Type Conference
Year 2009
Where KDD
Authors R. Dean Malmgren, Jake M. Hofman, Luis A. N. Amaral, Duncan J. Watts
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