Users' Traffic on Two-sided Internet Platforms. Qualitative Dynamics

Internet platforms' traffic defines important characteristics of platforms, such as price of services, advertisements, speed of operations. One can estimate the traffic with the traditional time series models like ARIMA, Holt-Winters, functional and kernel regressions. When using these methods, we usually want to smooth-out noise and remove various external effects in the data and obtain short-term predictions of processes. However, these models do not necessarily help us to understand the underlying mechanism and the tendencies of the processes. In this article, we discuss the dynamical system approach to the modeling, which is designed to discover the underlying mechanism and the qualitative properties of the system's phase portrait. We show how to reconstruct the governing differential equations from data. The external effects are modeled as system's parameters (initial conditions). Utilizing this new approach, we construct the models for the volume of users, interacting through Internet platforms, such as, Amazon. com, Homes.mil or Wikipedia.org. Then, we perform qualitative analysis of the system's phase portrait and discuss the main characteristics of the platforms.