English

Stability criteria for q-expectation values

Statistical Mechanics 2009-11-13 v2

Abstract

In statistical physics lately a specific kind of average, called the q-expectation value, has been extensively used in the context of q-generalized statistics dealing with distributions following power-laws. In this context q-expectation values appear naturally. After it has been recently shown that this non-linear functional is instable, under a very strong notion of stability, it is therefore of high interest to know sufficient conditions for when the results of q-expectations are robust under small variations of the underlying distribution function. We show that reasonable restrictions on the domain of admissible probability distributions restore uniform continuity for the q-expectation. Bounds on the size of admissible variations can be given. The practical usefulness of the theorems for estimating the robustness of the q-expectation value with respect to small variations is discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0808.4158,
  title  = {Stability criteria for q-expectation values},
  author = {Rudolf Hanel and Stefan Thurner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0808.4158},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

17 pages, no figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:15:11.523Z