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November 27, 2005
Irrational exuberance plus indelible sniping yields delectable entertainment
In a past entry (which sadly has not yet scrolled off the bottom of the front page - sad because it indicates how infrequently I am posting these days), I briefly discussed the amusing public debate by Barabasi et al. and Souffer et al. over Barabasi's model of correspondence. At that point, I found the exchange amusing and was inclined to agree with the response article. However, let me rehash this topic and expose a little more light on the subject.
From the original abstract of the article posted on arxiv.org by Barabasi:
Current models of human dynamics, used from risk assessment to communications, assume that human actions are randomly distributed in time and thus well approximated by Poisson processes. In contrast, ... the timing of many human activities, ranging from communication to entertainment and work patterns, [are] ... characterized by bursts of rapidly occurring events separated by long periods of inactivity. Here we show that the bursty nature of human behavior is a consequence of a decision based queuing process: when individuals execute tasks based on some perceived priority, the timing of the tasks will be heavy tailed, most tasks being rapidly executed, while a few experience very long waiting times.
(Emphasis is mine.) Barabasi is not one to shy away from grand claims of universality. As such, he epitomizes the thing that many of those outside of the discipline hate about physicists, i.e., their apparent arrogance. My opinion is that most physicists accused of intellectual arrogant are misunderstood, but that's a topic for another time.
Stouffer et al. responded a few months after Barabasi's original idea, as published in Nature, with the following (abstract):
In a recent letter, Barabasi claims that the dynamics of a number of human activities are scale-free. He specifically reports that the probability distribution of time intervals tau between consecutive e-mails sent by a single user and time delays for e-mail replies follow a power-law with an exponent -1, and proposes a priority-queuing process as an explanation of the bursty nature of human activity. Here, we quantitatively demonstrate that the reported power-law distributions are solely an artifact of the analysis of the empirical data and that the proposed model is not representative of e-mail communication patterns.
(Emphasis is mine.) In this comment, Stouffer et al. strongly criticize the data analysis that Barabasi uses to argue for the plausibility and, indeed, the correctness of his priority-based queueing model. I admit that when I first read Barabasi's queueing model, I thought that surely the smart folks who have been dealing with queueing theory (a topic nearly a century old!) knew something like this already. Even if that were the case, the idea certainly qualifies as interesting, and I'm happy to see a) the idea published, although Nature was likely not the appropriate place and b) the press attention that Barabasi has brought to the discipline of complex systems and modeling. Anyway, the heart of the data-analysis based critique of Barabasi's work lies in distinguishing two different kinds of heavy-tailed distributions: the log-normal and the power law. Because of a heavy tail is an asymptotic property, these two distributions can be extremely difficult to differentiate when the data only spans a few orders of magnitude (as is the case here). Fortunately, statisticians (and occasionally, myself) enjoy this sort of thing. Stouffer et al. employ such statistical tools in the form of Bayesian model selection to choose between the two hypotheses and find the evidence of the power law lacking. It was quite dissatisfying, however, that Stouffer et al. neglected to discuss their model selection procedure in detail, and instead chose to discuss the politicking over Barabasi's publication in Nature.
And so, it should come as no surprise that a rejoinder from Barabasi was soon issued. With each iteration of this process, the veneer of professionalism cracks away a little more:
[Stouffer et al.] revisit the datasets [we] studied..., making four technical observations. Some of [their] observations ... are based on the authors' unfamiliarity with the details of the data collection process and have little relevance to [our] findings ... and others are resolved in quantitative fashion by other authors.
In the response, Barabasi discusses the details of the dataset that Stouffer et al. fixated on: that the extreme short-time behavior of the data is actually an artifact of the way messages to multiple recipients were logged. They rightly emphasize that it is the existence of a heavy tail that is primarily interesting, rather than its exact form (of course, Barabasi made some noise about the exact form in the original paper). However, it is not sufficient to simply observe a heavy tail, posit an apparently plausible model that produces some kind of such tail and then declare victory, universality and issue a press release. (I'll return to this thought in a moment.) As a result, Barabasi's response, while clarifying a few details, does not address the fundamental problems with the original work. Problems that Stouffer et al. seem to intuit, but don't directly point out.
A month ago, Suresh over at the Geomblog published a comment on the controversy by Michael Mitzenmacher (whose work I greatly enjoy) in which he touches briefly on the real issue here.
While the rebuttal suggests the data is a better fit for the lognormal distribution, I am not a big believer in the fit-the-data approach to distinguish these distributions. The Barabasi paper actually suggested a model, which is nice, although the problem of how to verify such a model is challenge... This seems to be the real problem. Trust me, anyone can come up with a power law model. The challenge is figuring out how to show your model is actually right.
That is, first and foremost, the bursty nature of human activity is odd and, in that alluring voice only those fascinated by complex systems can hear, begs for an explanation. Second, a priority-based queueing process is merely one possible explanation (out of perhaps many) for the heaviness and burstiness. The emphasis is to point out that there is a real difficulty in nailing down causal mechanisms in human systems. often the best we can do is concoct a theory and see if the data supports it. That is, it is exceedingly difficult to go beyond mere plausibility without an overwhelming weight of empirical evidence and, preferably, the vetting of falsifiable hypotheses. The theory of natural selection is an excellent example that has been validated by just such a method (and continues to be). Unfortunately, simply looking at the response time statistics for email or letters by Darwin or Einstein, while interesting from the socio-historical perspective, does not prove the model. On the contrary: it merely suggests it.
That is, Barabasi's work demonstrates the empirical evidence (heavy-tails in the response times of correspondence) and offers a mathematical model that generates statistics of a similar form. It does not show causality, nor does it provide falsifiable hypotheses by which it could be invalidated. Barabasi's work in this case is suggestive but not explanatory, and should be judged accordingly. To me, it seems that the contention over the result derives partly from the overstatement of its generality, i.e., the authors claims their model to be explanatory. Thus, the argument over the empirical data is really just an argument about how much plausibility it imparts to the model. Had Barabasi gone beyond suggestion, I seriously doubt the controversy would exist.
Considering the issues raised here, personally, I think it's okay to publish a results that is merely suggestive so long as it is honestly made, diligently investigated and embodies a compelling and plausible story. That is to say that, ideally, authors should discuss the weakness of their model, empirical results and/or mathematical analysis, avoid overstating the generality of the result (sadly, a frequent problem in many of the papers I referee), carefully investigate possible biases and sources of error, and ideally, discuss alternative explanations. Admittedly, this last one may be asking a bit much. In a sense, these are the things I think about when I read any paper, but particularly when I referee something. This thread of thought seems to be fashionable right now, as I just noticed that Cosma's latest post discusses criteria for accepting or rejecting papers in the peer review process.
posted November 27, 2005 05:00 AM in Scientifically Speaking | permalink