  Participation in conferences is an important part of every scientific career.
Conferences provide an opportunity for a fast dissemination of latest results,
discussion and exchange of ideas, and broadening of scientists' collaboration
network. The decision to participate in a conference depends on several factors
like the location, cost, popularity of keynote speakers, and the scientists'
association with the community. Here we discuss and formulate the problem of
discovering how a scientists' previous participation affects her/his future
participations in the same conference series. We develop a stochastic model to
examine scientists' participation patterns in conferences and compare our model
with data from six conferences across various scientific fields and
communities. Our model shows that the probability for a scientist to
participate in a given conference series strongly depends on the balance
between the number of participations and non-participations during his/her
early connections with the community. An active participation in a conference
series strengthens the scientists' association with that particular conference
community and thus increases the probability of future participations.
