Nonlinear Chracterization of Activity Dynamics in Online Collaboration Websites

Modeling activity in online collaboration websites, such as StackExchange Question and Answering portals, is becoming increasingly important, as the success of these websites critically depends on the content contributed by its users. In this paper, we represent user activity as time series and perform an initial analysis of these time series to obtain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms that govern their creation. In particular, we are interested in identifying latent nonlinear behavior in online user activity as opposed to a simpler linear operating mode.