Related papers: On fitting power laws to ecological data
The derivation of the maximum entropy distribution of particles in boxes yields two kinds of distributions: a "bell-like" distribution and a long-tail distribution. The first one is obtained when the ratio between particles and boxes is…
Studies of collective human behavior in the social sciences, often grounded in details of actions by individuals, have much to offer `social' models from the physical sciences concerning elegant statistical regularities. Drawing on…
We study the situations when the solution to a weighted stochastic recursion has a power law tail. To this end, we develop two complementary approaches, the first one extends Goldie's (1991) implicit renewal theorem to cover recursions on…
The dominant approaches to text representation in natural language rely on learning embeddings on massive corpora which have convenient properties such as compositionality and distance preservation. In this paper, we develop a novel method…
Many social, technological, biological, and economical systems are best described by weighted networks, whose properties and dynamics depend not only on their structures but also on the connection weights among their nodes. However, most…
Standard statistical analysis is unable to provide reliable confidence intervals on expectation values of probability distributions that do not satisfy the conditions of the central limit theorem. We present a regression-based estimator of…
Animal behavior is shaped by a myriad of mechanisms acting on a wide range of scales, which hampers quantitative reasoning and the identification of general principles. Here, we combine data analysis and theory to investigate the…
We investigate the distribution of flavonoids, a major category of plant secondary metabolites, across species. Flavonoids are known to show high species specificity, and were once considered as chemical markers for understanding adaptive…
Real-world networks are generally claimed to be scale-free, meaning that the degree distributions follow the classical power-law, at least asymptotically. Yet, closer observation shows that the classical power-law distribution is often…
Insurance data can be asymmetric with heavy tails, causing inadequate adjustments of the usually applied models. To deal with this issue, hierarchical models for collective risk with heavy-tails of the claims distributions that take also…
Adaptation of asexual populations is driven by beneficial mutations and therefore the dynamics of this process, besides other factors, depend on the distribution of beneficial fitness effects. It is known that on uncorrelated fitness…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
Several probability distributions have been proposed in the literature, especially with the aim of obtaining models that are more flexible relative to the behaviors of the density and hazard rate functions. Recently, a new generalization of…
This work introduces a method for fitting to the degree distributions of complex network datasets, such that the most appropriate distribution from a set of candidate distributions is chosen while maximizing the portion of the distribution…
The power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…
Beck et al. (2013) introduced a new distribution class J which contains many heavy-tailed and light-tailed distributions obeying the principle of a single big jump. Using a simple transformation which maps heavy-tailed distributions to…
We propose a simple data model inspired from natural data such as text or images, and use it to study the importance of learning features in order to achieve good generalization. Our data model follows a long-tailed distribution in the…
To account quantitatively for many reported ``natural'' fat tail distributions in Nature and Economy, we propose the stretched exponential family as a complement to the often used power law distributions. It has many advantages, among which…
Over the last decades, impressive progresses have been made in many experimental domains, e.g. microscopic techniques such as single-particle tracking, leading to plethoric amounts of data. In a large variety of systems, from natural to…
A large number of models of the species abundance distribution (SAD) have been proposed, many of which are generically similar to the log-normal distribution, from which they are often indistinguishable when describing a given data set.…