Zipf's law from a Fisher variational-principle
Physics and Society
2015-05-13 v1 Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Abstract
Zipf's law is shown to arise as the variational solution of a problem formulated in Fisher's terms. An appropriate minimization process involving Fisher information and scale-invariance yields this universal rank distribution. As an example we show that the number of citations found in the most referenced physics journals follows this law.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0908.0501,
title = {Zipf's law from a Fisher variational-principle},
author = {A. Hernando and D. Puigdomenech and D. Villuendas and C. Vesperinas and A. Plastino},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.0501},
year = {2015}
}