To dial, perchance to group: Statistical analysis reveals clustered telephony patterns
(Phys.org)—Whether cellular calls, texting, instant messaging, there's more to communications than content: every exchange leaves behind an electronic trace that can be measured and studied. Recently, researchers led by Prof. Wei-Xing Zhou at East China University of Science and Technology and by Prof. H. Eugene Stanley at University of Boston studied intercall durations of the 100,000 most active cell phone users of a Chinese mobile phone operator. They found that these durations form three clusters – robot-based callers, telecom fraud and telephone sales – that follow a power-law distribution, but also found that calling patterns of individual users formed a fourth cluster that followed a Weibull distribution. The researchers conclude that their findings may enable a more detailed analysis of the huge body of data contained in the logs of massive numbers of users.