English
Related papers

Related papers: Universal Compression of Power-Law Distributions

200 papers

It turns out that some empirical facts in Big Data are the effects of properties of large numbers. Zipf's law 'noise' is an example of such an artefact. We expose several properties of the power law distributions and of similar distribution…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-05-09 Horia-Nicolai L. Teodorescu

Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of such scaling law,…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-04-12 Alvaro Corral , Francesc Font-Clos

We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and show that the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power-law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-18 B. Blasius , R. Toenjes

The Zipf distribution also known as scale-free distribution or discrete Pareto distribution, is the particular case of Power Law distribution with support the strictly positive integers. It is a one-parameter distribution with a linear…

Applications · Statistics 2013-04-29 Marta Pérez-Casany , Aina Casellas

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

Hilberg's conjecture about natural language states that the mutual information between two adjacent long blocks of text grows like a power of the block length. The exponent in this statement can be upper bounded using the pointwise mutual…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Łukasz Dębowski

A plethora of natural and socio-economic phenomena share a striking statistical regularity, that is the magnitude of elements decreases with a power law as a function of their position in a ranking of magnitude. Such regularity is known as…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-10-16 Davide Cugini , André Timpanaro , Giacomo Livan , Giacomo Guarnieri

A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-12-03 R. Ferrer-i-Cancho , A. Hernández-Fernández , D. Lusseau , G. Agoramoorthy , M. J. Hsu , S. Semple

Words in natural language follow a Zipfian distribution whereby some words are frequent but most are rare. Learning representations for words in the "long tail" of this distribution requires enormous amounts of data. Representations of rare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Dzmitry Bahdanau , Tom Bosc , Stanisław Jastrzębski , Edward Grefenstette , Pascal Vincent , Yoshua Bengio

Zipf's law on word frequency is observed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and so on, yet it does not hold for Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. A model for writing process is proposed to explain the above difference, which takes…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-05-03 Linyuan Lu , Zi-Ke Zhang , Tao Zhou

Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis rely on informed probability priors to encourage good solutions. This paper empirically analyses whether text in medical discharge reports follow Zipf's law, a commonly assumed statistical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Juan C Quiroz , Liliana Laranjo , Catalin Tufanaru , Ahmet Baki Kocaballi , Dana Rezazadegan , Shlomo Berkovsky , Enrico Coiera

A set of data with positive values follows a Pareto distribution if the log-log plot of value versus rank is approximately a straight line. A Pareto distribution satisfies Zipf's law if the log-log plot has a slope of -1. Since many types…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2020-06-04 Ricardo T. Fernholz , Robert Fernholz

The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the 'history' of word-usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-28 Stefan Thurner , Rudolf Hanel , Bo Liu , Bernat Corominas-Murtra

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes , Erich R. Round

We model the generation of words with independent unequal probabilities of occurrence of letters. We prove that the probability $p(r)$ of occurrence of words of rank $r$ has a power asymptotics. As distinct from the paper published earlier…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-05-27 V. V. Bochkarev , E. Yu. Lerner

Empirical distributions have their in-sample maxima as natural censoring. We look at the "hidden tail", that is, the part of the distribution in excess of the maximum for a sample size of $n$. Using extreme value theory, we examine the…

Statistical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2020-04-14 Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so…

Physics and Society · Physics 2007-05-23 Z. K. Silagadze

We study minimization of a parametric family of relative entropies, termed relative $\alpha$-entropies (denoted $\mathscr{I}_{\alpha}(P,Q)$). These arise as redundancies under mismatched compression when cumulants of compressed lengths are…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-10-21 M. Ashok Kumar , Rajesh Sundaresan

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

Zipf's law in language lacks a definitive origin, debated across fields. This study explains Zipf-like behavior using geometric mechanisms without linguistic elements. The Full Combinatorial Word Model (FCWM) forms words from a finite…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-27 Vladimir Berman