文献类型：期刊文献

英文题名：Statistical properties of user activity fluctuations in virtual worlds

作者：Yang, Yan-Hong[1,2];Xie, Wen-Jie[1,2];Li, Ming-Xia[2,3];Jiang, Zhi-Qiang[1,2];Zhou, Wei-Xing[1,2,4]

机构：[1]East China Univ Sci & Technol, Sch Business, 130 Meilong Rd,POB 114, Shanghai 200237, Peoples R China;[2]East China Univ Sci & Technol, Res Ctr Econophys, Shanghai 200237, Peoples R China;[3]East China Univ Sci & Technol, Sch Sports Sci & Engn, Shanghai 200237, Peoples R China;[4]East China Univ Sci & Technol, Dept Math, Shanghai 200237, Peoples R China

年份：2017

卷号：105

起止页码：271

外文期刊名：CHAOS SOLITONS & FRACTALS

收录：;EI(收录号：20174604392092);WOS:【SCI-EXPANDED(收录号:WOS:000416642100034)】；

基金：We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Errors are ours. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11375064, 11505063, 11605062), the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (2016M600291), the Shanghai Chenguang Program (15CG29), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (222201718006).

语种：英文

外文关键词：Multifractal analysis; Partition function; Power law; Intraday pattern; Virtual world

摘要：User activity fluctuations reflect the performance of online society. We investigate the statistical properties of 1 min user activity time series of simultaneously online users inhabited in 95 independent virtual worlds. The number of online users exhibits clear intraday and weekly patterns due to human's circadian rhythms and weekly cycles. Statistical analysis shows that the distribution of absolute activity fluctuations has a power-law tail for 44 virtual worlds with an average tail exponent close to 2.15. The partition function approach unveils that the absolute activity fluctuations possess multifractal features for all the 95 virtual worlds. For the sample of 44 virtual worlds with power-law tailed distributions of the absolute activity fluctuations, the width of singularity Delta alpha ais negatively correlated with the maximum activity (p-value = 0.070) and the time to the maximum activity (p-value = 0.010). The negative correlations are not observed for neither the other 51 virtual worlds nor the whole sample of the 95 virtual worlds. In addition, numerical experiments indicate that both temporal structure and large fluctuations have influence on the multifractal spectrum. We also find that the temporal structure has a stronger impact on the singularity width than large fluctuations. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.