Analyzing the posting behaviors in news forums with incremental inter-event time

Online human behaviors are widely discussed in various fields. Three key factors, named priority, interest and memory are found crucial in human behaviors. Existing research mainly focuses on the identified and active users. However, the anonymous users and the inactive ones exist widely in news forums, whose behaviors do not receive enough attention. They cannot offer abundant postings like the others. It requires us to study posting behaviors of all the users including anonymous ones, identified ones, active ones and inactive ones in news forums only at the collective level. In this paper, the memory effects of the posting behaviors in news forums are investigated at the collective level. On the basis of the incremental inter-event time, a new model is proposed to describe the posting behaviors at the collective level. The results on twelve actual news events demonstrate the good performance of our model to describe the posting behaviors at the collective level in news forums. In addition, we find the symmetric incremental inter-event time distribution and the similar posting patterns in different durations.