Neologisms are epidemic: Modeling the life cycle of neologisms in China 2008-2016
Fig 5
The predictive power of the SIR model.
One can use the SIR model to predict the popularity evolution of a neologism based on a small amount of data before reaching the inflection point. A fraction of data to be fitted and the remaining data are denoted by red and blue circles respectively. In order to derive α and β, the testing exponential functions denoted by black squares are used to fit with the data of 舌尖上 she2jian1shang4 “on the tip of the tongue” and 低碳 di1tan4 “low-carbon” as shown in (a) and (c) respectively. By utilizing the parameters derived from this step, we can obtain the predicted popularity evolution over time, indicated by the black diamonds, according to the small amount of data, which is very close to the green fitting curves yielded by fitting the full data, as illustrated in (b), (d).