Bursts in human and natural activities are highly clustered in time or space, suggesting that these activities are influenced by previous events within the social or natural system. Such bursty behavior in the real world conveys substantial information of underlying diffusion processes, which have been studied based on point process approaches in diverse scientific communities from online social media to criminology and epidemiology. However, universal components of real-world diffusion dynamics that cut across disciplines remain unexplored with a common overarching perspective. In this review, we introduce a wide range of diffusion processes from diverse research fields, define a taxonomy of common major factors in diffusion dynamics, interpret their diffusion models from the theoretical perspectives of point processes, and compare them with respect to universal effects on diffusion. These all can provide new insights on spatial and temporal bursty events capturing underlying diffusion dynamics. We expect that the comprehensive aspects of diffusion dynamics in the real world can motivate transdisciplinary research and provide contextual components of a fundamental framework for more generalizable diffusion models.

中文翻译：

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基于点过程方法的真实世界扩散动力学：综述

人类和自然活动的爆发在时间或空间上高度聚集，表明这些活动受到社会或自然系统中先前事件的影响。现实世界中的这种突发行为传达了潜在扩散过程的大量信息，这些信息已经基于从在线社交媒体到犯罪学和流行病学的不同科学界的点过程方法进行了研究。然而，现实世界中跨越学科的扩散动力学的普遍组成部分仍未以共同的总体视角进行探索。在这篇综述中，我们介绍了来自不同研究领域的广泛扩散过程，定义了扩散动力学中常见主要因素的分类，从点过程的理论角度解释了它们的扩散模型，并比较它们对扩散的普遍影响。这些都可以为捕捉潜在扩散动力学的空间和时间突发事件提供新的见解。我们期望现实世界中扩散动力学的综合方面可以激发跨学科研究，并为更普遍的扩散模型提供基本框架的上下文组件。