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Related papers: The Rank-Size Scaling Law and Entropy-Maximizing P…

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Zipf's law, and power laws in general, have attracted and continue to attract considerable attention in a wide variety of disciplines - from astronomy to demographics to software structure to economics to linguistics to zoology, and even…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-05-10 Matt Visser

It is traditionally assumed that Zipf's law implies the power-law growth of the number of different elements with the total number of elements in a system - the so-called Heaps' law. We show that a careful definition of Zipf's law leads to…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-17 Francesc Font-Clos , Alvaro Corral

Quantum many-body states that frequently appear in physics often obey an entropy scaling law, meaning that an entanglement entropy of a subsystem can be expressed as a sum of terms that scale linearly with its volume and area, plus a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-05-26 Isaac H. Kim

The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household ($\sim 10^{-2}$ km) to continental ($\sim 10^4$ km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-03-23 Henry W. Lin , Abraham Loeb

As the most fundamental empirical law, Zipf's law has been studied from many aspects. But its meaning is still an open problem. Some models have been constructed to explain Zipf's law. In the letter, a new concept named nonsymmetric entropy…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2007-05-23 Chengshi Liu

We study the distribution of neighborhoods across a set of 12 global cities and find that the distribution of neighborhood sizes follows exponential decay across all cities under consideration. We are able to analytically show that this…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-10-15 Anand Sahasranaman , Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen

The dependence with text length of the statistical properties of word occurrences has long been considered a severe limitation quantitative linguistics. We propose a simple scaling form for the distribution of absolute word frequencies…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-15 Francesc Font-Clos , Gemma Boleda , Álvaro Corral

Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-09-26 Charlotte James , Sandro Azaele , Amos Maritan , Filippo Simini

We use the formalism of 'Maximum Principle of Shannon's Entropy' to derive the general power law distribution function, using what seems to be a reasonable physical assumption, namely, the demand of a constant mean "internal order"…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Yaniv Dover

We present a thermodynamic formulation for scale-invariant systems based on the principle of extreme information. We create an analogy between these systems and the well-known thermodynamics of gases and fluids, and study as a compelling…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-06-11 A. Hernando , D. Puigdomenech , D. Villuendas , C. Vesperinas

Two fundamental issues surrounding research on Zipf's law regarding city sizes are whether and why this law holds. This paper does not deal with the latter issue with respect to why, and instead investigates whether Zipf's law holds in a…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2020-11-09 Bin Jiang , Junjun Yin , Qingling Liu

Zipf's law, which states that the probability of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank, has been observed in many domains. While there are models that explain Zipf's law in each of them, those explanations are typically…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2016-07-06 Laurence Aitchison , Nicola Corradi , Peter E. Latham

The growth dynamics of complex systems often exhibit statistical regularities involving power-law relationships. For real finite complex systems formed by countable tokens (animals, words) as instances of distinct types (species, dictionary…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-03-31 Pablo Rosillo-Rodes , Laurent Hébert-Dufresne , Peter Sheridan Dodds

With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-03-05 Jake Ryland Williams , Paul R. Lessard , Suma Desu , Eric Clark , James P. Bagrow , Christopher M. Danforth , Peter Sheridan Dodds

The law of allometric scaling based on Zipf distributions can be employed to research hierarchies of cities in a geographical region. However, the allometric patterns are easily influenced by random disturbance from the noises in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-19 Yanguang Chen , Jian Feng

We introduce a non-growth model that generates the power-law distribution with the Zipf exponent. There are N elements, each of which is characterized by a quantity, and at each time step these quantities are redistributed through binary…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2012-04-27 Suhan Ree

Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-10-06 Luis M. A. Bettencourt , Jose Lobo

Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-03-12 Eszter Bokányi , Dániel Kondor , Gábor Vattay

Scaling laws aim to accurately predict model performance across different scales. Existing scaling-law studies almost exclusively rely on cross-entropy as the evaluation metric. However, cross-entropy provides only a partial view of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Baoqing Yue , Jinyuan Zhou , Zixi Wei , Jingtao Zhan , Qingyao Ai , Yiqun Liu

Stochastic equations constitute a major ingredient in many branches of science, from physics to biology and engineering. Not surprisingly, they appear in many quantitative studies of complex systems. In particular, this type of equation is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-08-02 Marc Barthelemy