Modelling and Analysis of User Behaviour in Online Communities

Understanding and forecasting the health of an online community is of great value to its owners and managers who have vested interests in its longevity and success. Nevertheless, the association between community evolution and the behavioural patterns and trends of its members is not clearly understood, which hinders our ability of making accurate predictions of whether a community is flourishing or diminishing. In this paper we use statistical analysis, combined with a semantic model and rules for representing and computing behaviour in online communities. We apply this model on a number of forum communities from Boards.ie to categorise behaviour of community members over time, and report on how different behaviour compositions correlate with positive and negative community growth in these forums.