Modeling and forecasting of daily online-user movement in instant messaging based on the elliptic-orbit model: A case study for China

Instant Messaging (IM) has been an effective, popular and important mode for immediate communication in the digital age. Then analysis of daily user-online movement in IM is increasingly important for its significant effect on information propagation, commercial operation, resource allocation and maintenance management. In this study, the so-called elliptic orbit model is proposed to describe daily user-online movement in IM by mapping its time-series into the polar coordinates to establish the elliptic orbit model, in which each 24-hour movement is depicted as one elliptic orbit. Experiments in the most popular IM service in China called the Tencent QQ and result analysis indicate potentiality of the proposed method. It is shown that the daily 24-hour user-online movement in IM is well described by the elliptic orbit model, which provides a vivid approach for modeling and predicting daily user-online movement in IM in a concise and intuitive way.