Real-world diffusion dynamics based on point process approaches: a review

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.