Human behavior during Flash Crowd in web surfing

This paper focuses on human behavior in web surfing during the special stage called Flash Crowd (FC) period. Some statistical properties of human behavior are investigated. A moving approximate entropy (ApEn) method is provided to precisely locate the FC stage at first. Then the multiscale entropy (MSE) method is applied to study the difference of behaviors between the FC stage and the Normal stage. The lower entropy value may imply that collective behavior in the FC stage tends to be more consistent and follows a process with self-similarity. Further investigation by MSE and interval time distribution on the collective level and the individual level reveals that the origin of FC formation is not due to the increasing number of users, but more likely the change of dynamic mechanism of individual behavior.