Long-tailed distributions of inter-event times as mixtures of exponential distributions.

ABSTRACT: Inter-event times of various human behaviour are apparently non-Poissonian and obey long-tailed distributions as opposed to exponential distributions, which correspond to Poisson processes. It has been suggested that human individuals may switch between different states, in each of which they are regarded to generate events obeying a Poisson process. If this is the case, inter-event times should approximately obey a mixture of exponential distributions with different parameter values. In the present study, we introduce the minimum description length principle to compare mixtures of exponential distributions with different numbers of components (i.e. constituent exponential distributions). Because these distributions violate the identifiability property, one is mathematically not allowed to

SUBMITTER: Okada M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7062064 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature