English

Fitting heavy tailed distributions: the poweRlaw package

Computation 2014-07-15 v1 Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

Over the last few years, the power law distribution has been used as the data generating mechanism in many disparate fields. However, at times the techniques used to fit the power law distribution have been inappropriate. This paper describes the poweRlaw R package, which makes fitting power laws and other heavy-tailed distributions straightforward. This package contains R functions for fitting, comparing and visualising heavy tailed distributions. Overall, it provides a principled approach to power law fitting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.3492,
  title  = {Fitting heavy tailed distributions: the poweRlaw package},
  author = {Colin S Gillespie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.3492},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

The code for this paper can be found at https://github.com/csgillespie/poweRlaw

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:02:57.944Z