Related papers: Family name distributions: Master equation approac…
A stochastic model for the evolution of a growing population is proposed, in order to explain empirical power-law distributions in the frequency of family names as a function of the family size. Preliminary results show that the predicted…
We study the frequency distribution of family names. From a common data base, we count the number of people who share the same family name. This is the size of the family. We find that (i) the total number of different family names in a…
Surnames and nonrecombining alleles are inherited from a single parent in a highly similar way. A simple birth-death model with mutations can accurately describe this process. Exponentially growing and constant populations are investigated,…
We examine the problem of family size statistics (the number of individuals carrying the same surname, or the same DNA sequence) in a given size subsample of an exponentially growing population. We approach the problem from two directions.…
According to many phenomenological and theoretical studies the distribution of family name frequencies in a population can be asymptotically described by a power law. We show that the Galton-Watson process corresponding to the dynamics of a…
Selected examples of possible origins of power-law distributions are presented.
The family name distribution in Korea is investigated in comparison with previous studies in other countries. In Korea, both the family name and its birthplace, where the ancestor of the family originated, are commonly used to distinguish…
We analyze the social mechanisms that shape the popularity rise and fall of the names given to newborn babies. During the initial stage, popularity increases by imitation. As the people with the same name grow in number, however, its usage…
An individual's identity in a human society is specified by his or her name. Differently from family names, usually inherited from fathers, a given name for a child is often chosen at the parents' disposal. However, their decision cannot be…
Several populational networks present complex topologies when implemented in evolutionary algorithms. A common feature of these topologies is the emergence of a power law. Power law behavior with different scaling factors can also be…
Current-day genomes bear the mark of the evolutionary processes. One of the strongest indications is the sequence homology among families of proteins that perform similar biological functions in different species. The number of proteins in…
When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
We review briefly the concepts underlying complex systems and probability distributions. The later are often taken as the first quantitative characteristics of complex systems, allowing one to detect the possible occurrence of regularities…
In this second part of our survey on the social and natural distributions, we investigate some models, which intend to explain the statistical regularity of the natural and social distributions. There is a large variety of models and in…
We empirically study the genealogical trees of ten families for about five centuries in Korea. Although each family tree contains only the paternal part, the family names of women married to the family have been recorded, which allows us to…
More than one billion data sampled with different frequencies from several financial instruments were investigated with the aim of testing whether they involve power law. As a result, a known power law with the power exponent around -4 was…
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…
In social sciences, there is currently no consensus on the mechanism for cultural evolution. The evolution of first names of newborn babies offers a remarkable example for the researches in the field. Here we perform statistical analyses on…
We describe a formal approach based on graphical causal models to identify the "root causes" of the change in the probability distribution of variables. After factorizing the joint distribution into conditional distributions of each…