Modeling correlated human dynamics with temporal preference

•We found strong memory in the interevent time distribution of blog-posting.•We found the decay curve of it have two regimes: it decays as a power law for the short-term part and exponentially for the long-term part.•We propose a simple model based on temporal preference which reproduces all features we obtained.

We empirically study the activity pattern of individual blog-posting and observe the interevent time distributions decay as power-laws at both individual and population level. As different from previous studies, we find significant short-term memory in it. Moreover, the memory coefficient first decays in a power law and then turns to an exponential form. Our findings produce evidence for the strong short-term memory in human dynamics and challenge previous models. Accordingly, we propose a simple model based on temporal preference, which can well reproduce both the heavy-tailed nature and the strong memory effects. This work helps in understanding the temporal regularities of online human behaviors.