Heavy-Tailed Statistics in Short-Message Communication

Short-message (SM) is one of the most frequently used communication channels in modern society. Based on the SM communication records provided by some volunteers, we investigate the statistics of SM communication pattern, including the inter-event time distributions between two consecutive short messages and two conversations, and the distribution of message number contained in a complete conversation. In the individual level, the empirical result raises strong evidence that the human activity pattern, exhibiting a heavy-tailed inter-event time distribution, is driven by a non-Poisson process.