Fig. 3

Temporal features of human communication. (i) Visual representation of different temporal features for similar number of contacts, w. (i, a) Temporal stability TS, where we only consider the first and last times during the observation period. (i, b) Estimation of the inter-event time (IET) distribution \(\tau\), the elapsed time between consecutive events. (i, c) Example of bursty behaviour, where bursts of consecutive calls are followed by longer IETs. The burstiness coefficient is defined as \(B=\frac{\sigma - \mu }{\sigma + \mu }\) for \(\mu\), \(\sigma\) the mean and standard deviation of \(\tau\). (ii) Empirical distribution of number of contacts w for the epistolary dataset and four reference datasets. (iii) Empirical distribution of temporal stability TS for the epistolary and reference datasets. For each case, we plot the distributions conditioned on link weight quartiles. For ease of comparison, we do not include individual data points, but present averaged binned values