A Weak-Tie Based Regularity Analysis of Mobile Clickstreams

Advances in wireless technologies and their penetration into every-day life can create a new context with multiple simultaneous sub-contexts. The mobile Internet leverages multiple contexts with its any-time/any-place capability. This leads to a new third state for Internet use contexts, a weakly-tied state, in addition to the two existing states: active (strongly-tied) and inactive. The author attempts to identify the user behavior patterns derived from this weak-tie based approach. The author proposes an interval analysis of the mobile clickstream in order to identify regular users. From the observation, the author shows a positive relation between the hourly-scale interval of mobile Web visits and the revisit ratio in the next month, indicating the degree of the user loyalty to a specific mobile Web site.