Santos Tiago, Walk Simon, Helic Denis
2017
Modeling activity in online collaboration websites, such asStackExchange Question and Answering portals, is becom-ing increasingly important, as the success of these websitescritically depends on the content contributed by its users. Inthis paper, we represent user activity as time series and per-form an initial analysis of these time series to obtain a bet-ter understanding of the underlying mechanisms that governtheir creation. In particular, we are interested in identifyinglatent nonlinear behavior in online user activity as opposedto a simpler linear operating mode. To that end, we applya set of statistical tests for nonlinearity as a means to char-acterize activity time series derived from 16 different onlinecollaboration websites. We validate our approach by com-paring activity forecast performance from linear and nonlin-ear models, and study the underlying dynamical systems wederive with nonlinear time series analysis. Our results showthat nonlinear characterizations of activity time series helpto (i) improve our understanding of activity dynamics in on-line collaboration websites, and (ii) increase the accuracy offorecasting experiments.