Related papers: Fat tailed distributions for deaths in conflicts a…
The size that an epidemic can reach, measured in terms of the number of fatalities, is an extremely relevant quantity. It has been recently claimed [Cirillo & Taleb, Nature Physics 2020] that the size distribution of major epidemics in…
In order to account for large variance and fat tail of damage by natural disaster, we study a simple model by combining distributions of disaster and population/property with their spatial correlation. We assume fat-tailed or power-law…
Human activities can play a crucial role in the statistical properties of observables in many complex systems such as social, technological and economic systems. We demonstrate this by looking into the heavy-tailed distributions of…
The notion that natural disasters can be controlled is, of course, farcical; history is permeated with examples of countless failed attempts at this pointless task; it is synonymous with trying to build a perpetual motion machine.…
This paper discusses the use of fat-tailed distributions in catastrophe prediction as opposed to the more common use of the Normal Distribution.
We are able to unify various disparate claims and results in the literature, that stand in the way of a unified description and understanding of human conflict. First, we provide a reconciliation of the numerically different exponent values…
The total number of fatalities of an epidemic outbreak is a dramatic but extremely informative quantity. Knowledge of the statistics of this quantity allows the calculation of the mean total number of fatalities conditioned to the fact that…
We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of historical data. We introduce a novel approach to apply extreme value theory to…
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"…
Heavy-tailed or power-law distributions are becoming increasingly common in biological literature. A wide range of biological data has been fitted to distributions with heavy tails. Many of these studies use simple fitting methods to find…
We consider stochastic growth models for populations organized in colonies and subject to uniform catastrophes. To assess population viability, we analyze scenarios in which individuals adopt dispersion strategies after catastrophic events.…
We have studied the time lags between commercial line airplane disasters and their occurrence frequency till 2002, as obtained from a freely available website. We show that the time lags seem to be well described by Poisson random events,…
Quantities with right-skewed distributions are ubiquitous in complex social systems, including political conflict, economics and social networks, and these systems sometimes produce extremely large events. For instance, the 9/11 terrorist…
Extreme events have an important role which is sometime catastrophic in a variety of natural phenomena including climate, earthquakes and turbulence, as well as in man-made environments like financial markets. Statistical analysis and…
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…
Dynamical systems in nature exhibit selfsimilar fractal fluctuations and the corresponding power spectra follow inverse power law form signifying long-range space-time correlations identified as self-organized criticality. The physics of…
Power-law distributions are typical macroscopic features occurring in almost all complex systems observable in nature. As a result, researchers in quantitative analyses must often generate random synthetic variates obeying power-law…
Over the last few decades power law distributions have been suggested as forming generative mechanisms in a variety of disparate fields, such as, astrophysics, criminology and database curation. However, fitting these heavy tailed…
Cirillo and Taleb [Nature Phys. 16, 606-613 (2020)] study the size of major epidemics in human history in terms of the number of fatalities. Using the figures from 72 epidemics, from the plague of Athens (429 BC) to the COVID-19…
The size or energy of diverse structures or phenomena in geoscience appears to follow power-law distributions. A rigorous statistical analysis of such observations is tricky, though. Observables can span several orders of magnitude, but the…