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We introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. By regarding the time evolution of the model as a random walk in the logarithmic scale, we explain theoretically why this model reproduces Zipf's law. The explanation shows…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-07 Kenji Kawamura , Naomichi Hatano

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

The rank-size regularity known as Zipf's law is one of scaling laws and frequently observed within the natural living world and in social institutions. Many scientists tried to derive the rank-size scaling relation by entropy-maximizing…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-21 Yanguang Chen

Zipf's law in its basic incarnation is an empirical probability distribution governing the frequency of usage of words in a language. As Terence Tao recently remarked, it still lacks a convincing and satisfactory mathematical explanation.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-04-30 Yuri I. Manin

Apparently random events in nature often reveal hidden patterns when analysed using diverse and robust statistical tools. Power-law distributions, for example, project diverse natural phenomenon, ranging from earthquakes1 to heartbeat…

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 of city-size distributions can be expressed by three types of mathematical models: one-parameter form, two-parameter form, and three-parameter form. The one-parameter and one of the two-parameter models are familiar to urban…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-19 Yanguang Chen

Zipf's law is well known in linguistics: the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. This is a special case of a more general power law, a common phenomenon in many kinds of real-world statistical data. Here, it is shown…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-10-28 Wim Hordijk

Zipf's law is the main regularity of quantitative linguistics. Despite of many works devoted to foundations of this law, it is still unclear whether it is only a statistical regularity, or it has deeper relations with information-carrying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Weibing Deng , Armen E. Allahverdyan

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

Although power laws of the Zipf type have been used by many workers to fit rank distributions in different fields like in economy, geophysics, genetics, soft-matter, networks etc., these fits usually fail at the tails. Some distributions…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-10-12 Gerardo G. Naumis , Germinal Cocho

We report about universality of rank-integration distributions of open spaces in city space syntax similar to the famous rank-size distributions of cities (Zipf's law). We also demonstrate that the degree of choice an open space represents…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 D. Volchenkov , Ph. Blanchard

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

Zipf's law is a hallmark of several complex systems with a modular structure, such as books composed by words or genomes composed by genes. In these component systems, Zipf's law describes the empirical power law distribution of component…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-12-05 Andrea Mazzolini , Alberto Colliva , Michele Caselle , Matteo Osella

The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-04-20 Richard Perline , Ronald Perline

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…

Applications · Statistics 2024-07-24 Clement Lee , Emma Eastoe , Aiden Farrell

We address the general problem of testing a power law distribution versus a log-normal distribution in statistical data. This general problem is illustrated on the distribution of the 2000 US census of city sizes. We provide definitive…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-05-14 Y. Malevergne , V. Pisarenko , D. Sornette

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

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

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