https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2016-60926-8
Regular Article
A stochastic evolutionary model generating a mixture of exponential distributions
Department of Computer Science and Information
Systems, Birkbeck, University of London, London
WC1E 7HX,
UK
a
e-mail: mlevene@dcs.bbk.ac.uk
Received:
30
November
2015
Received in final form:
14
January
2016
Published online:
17
February
2016
Recent interest in human dynamics has stimulated the investigation of the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in various contexts, such as mobile phone networks and social media. In this paper, we extend the stochastic urn-based model proposed in [T. Fenner, M. Levene, G. Loizou, J. Stat. Mech. 2015, P08015 (2015)] so that it can generate mixture models, in particular, a mixture of exponential distributions. The model is designed to capture the dynamics of survival analysis, traditionally employed in clinical trials, reliability analysis in engineering, and more recently in the analysis of large data sets recording human dynamics. The mixture modelling approach, which is relatively simple and well understood, is very effective in capturing heterogeneity in data. We provide empirical evidence for the validity of the model, using a data set of popular search engine queries collected over a period of 114 months. We show that the survival function of these queries is closely matched by the exponential mixture solution for our model.
Key words: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2016