Public risk perception and emotion on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic

Applied Network Science

Table 7 Comparison of \(R^2\) between the models of attention

\(R^2\) Country	Power law	Weber–Fechner law	Linear relationship
Argentina	0.411	0.421	0.387
Australia	0.259	0.275	0.247
Canada	0.678	0.683	0.607
Chile	0.382	0.395	0.216
Colombia	0.425	0.319	0.28
India	0.558	0.397	0.477
Mexico	0.78	0.775	0.613
Nigeria	0.143	0.004	0.007
South Africa	0.16	0.171	0.119
Spain	− 0.042	0	0.047
UK	0.514	0.555	0.399
USA	0.608	0.556	0.24
Mean	0.36	0.379	0.303
Proportion of best fits	41.7%	50%	8.33%
Proportion of second-best fits	66.7%	33.3%	0%

We compare the power law model of Eq. (11), the Weber–Fechner model of Eq. (10) and a linear relationship between variables, which we use as a benchmark model. Higher values indicate better models; italics indicate the best model for that country