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Science in the 21st century seems to be governed by novel approaches involving interdisciplinary work, systemic perspectives and complexity theory concepts. These new paradigms force us to leave aside our elder mechanistic approaches and…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-02-24 Oscar Fontanelli , Pedro Miramontes , Ricardo Mansilla

In search of many social and economical systems, it is found that node strength distribution as well as degree distribution demonstrate the behavior of power-law with droop-head and heavy-tail. We present a new model for the growth of…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2007-05-23 Chuan-Ji Fu , Qing Ou , Wen Chen , Bing-Hong Wang , Ying-Di Jin , Yong-Wei Niu , Tao Zhou

The recent availability of electronic datasets containing large volumes of communication data has made it possible to study human behavior on a larger scale than ever before. From this, it has been discovered that across a diverse range of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-08 Gordon J Ross , Tim Jones

For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were attributed to…

Biological Physics · Physics 2009-11-06 Johan Chu , Chris Adami

Power-law tails are ubiquitous in income distributions and in the energy distributions of diluted relativistic gases. We analyze the conceptual link between these two cases. In economic interactions fat tails arise because the richest…

General Physics · Physics 2016-01-25 G. Modanese

Natural language data follows a power-law distribution, with most knowledge and skills appearing at very low frequency. While a common intuition suggests that reweighting or curating data towards a uniform distribution may help models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Zixuan Wang , Xingyu Dang , Jason D. Lee , Kaifeng Lyu

We demonstrate that distributions of human response times have power-law tails and, among closed-form distributions, are best fit by the generalized inverse gamma distribution. We speculate that the task difficulty tracks the half-width of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2013-05-29 Tao Ma , John G. Holden , R. A. Serota

Taylor's law, also known as fluctuation scaling in physics and the power-law variance function in statistics, is an empirical pattern widely observed across fields including ecology, physics, finance, and epidemiology. It states that the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-13 Pok Him Cheng , Joel E. Cohen , Hok Kan Ling , Sheung Chi Phillip Yam

I report a new statistical distribution formulated to confront the infamous, long-standing, computational/modeling challenge presented by highly skewed and/or leptokurtic ("fat- or heavy-tailed") data. The distribution is straightforward,…

Statistical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2011-11-01 Lawrence R. Thorne

Various molecular interaction networks have been claimed to follow power-law decay for their global connectivity distribution. It has been proposed that there may be underlying generative models that explain this heavy-tailed behavior by…

Molecular Networks · Quantitative Biology 2010-04-20 Adrián López García de Lomana , Qasim K. Beg , G. de Fabritiis , Jordi Villà-Freixa

Power laws and distributions with heavy tails are common features of many experimentally studied complex systems, like the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and solar flares, or the duration of neuronal avalanches in the brain.…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2014-03-05 Dimitrije Markovic , Claudius Gros

This short communication uses a simple experiment to show that fitting to a power law distribution by using graphical methods based on linear fit on the log-log scale is biased and inaccurate. It shows that using maximum likelihood…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-10 Michel L. Goldstein , Steven A. Morris , Gary G. Yen

Fat tailed statistics and power-laws are ubiquitous in many complex systems. Usually the appearance of of a few anomalously successful individuals (bio-species, investors, websites) is interpreted as reflecting some inherent "quality"…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-05-20 Yosef E. Maruvka , David A. Kessler , Nadav M. Shnerb

Understanding the shape of a distribution of data is of interest to people in a great variety of fields, as it may affect the types of algorithms used for that data. We study one such problem in the framework of distribution property…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Amartya Shankha Biswas , Kavya Ravichandran , Ronitt Rubinfeld

Although power laws of the Zipf type have been used by many workers to fit rank distributions in different fields like in economy, geophysics, genetics, soft-matter, networks etc., these fits usually fail at the tails. Some distributions…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-10-12 Gerardo G. Naumis , Germinal Cocho

An expanded family of mixtures of multivariate power exponential distributions is introduced. While fitting heavy-tails and skewness has received much attention in the model-based clustering literature recently, we investigate the use of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-06-15 Utkarsh J. Dang , Ryan P. Browne , Paul D. McNicholas

Complex biological networks, encompassing metabolic pathways, gene regulatory systems, and protein-protein interaction networks, often exhibit scale-free structures characterized by heavy-tailed degree distributions. However, empirical…

This paper introduces a new two-parameter distribution, referred to as the Shiha distribution, which provides a flexible model for skewed lifetime data with either heavy or light tails. The proposed distribution is applicable to various…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-04 F. A. Shiha

Power laws have been found to describe a wide variety of natural (physical, biological, astronomic, meteorological, geological) and man-made (social, financial, computational) phenomena over a wide range of magnitudes, although their…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Sam Ma

The degree distributions of complex networks are usually considered to be power law. However, it is not the case for a large number of them. We thus propose a new model able to build random growing networks with (almost) any wanted degree…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Thibaud Trolliet , Frédéric Giroire , Stéphane Pérennes