English
Related papers

Related papers: Zipf's and Taylor's Laws

200 papers

Skewness and kurtosis are fundamental statistical moments commonly used to quantify asymmetry and tail behavior in probability distributions. Despite their widespread application in statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, and…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2025-06-23 Carlo De Michele , Samuele De Bartolo

The study of complex systems is limited by the fact that only few variables are accessible for modeling and sampling, which are not necessarily the most relevant ones to explain the systems behavior. In addition, empirical data typically…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-11-04 Matteo Marsili , Iacopo Mastromatteo , Yasser Roudi

In this article, the relationship between two well-accepted empirical propositions regarding the distribution of population in cities, namely, Gibrat's law and Zipf's law, are rigorously examined using the Chinese census data. Our findings…

Physics and Society · Physics 2010-01-07 Kausik Gangopadhyay , B. Basu

Why does Zipf's law give a good description of data from seemingly completely unrelated phenomena? Here it is argued that the reason is that they can all be described as outcomes of a ubiquitous random group division: the elements can be…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-19 Seung Ki Baek , Sebastian Bernhardsson , Petter Minnhagen

The different between the inverse power function and the negative exponential function is significant. The former suggests a complex distribution, while the latter indicates a simple distribution. However, the association of the power-law…

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

Despite being a paradigm of quantitative linguistics, Zipf's law for words suffers from three main problems: its formulation is ambiguous, its validity has not been tested rigorously from a statistical point of view, and it has not been…

Applications · Statistics 2016-02-17 Isabel Moreno-Sánchez , Francesc Font-Clos , Álvaro Corral

The evolution of open source software projects in Linux distributions offers a remarkable example of a growing complex self-organizing adaptive system, exhibiting Zipf's law over four full decades. We present three tests of the usually…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2014-08-26 T. Maillart , D. Sornette , S. Spaeth , G. Von Krogh

Many natural patterns, such as the distributions of blood particles in a blood sample, proteins on cell surfaces, biological populations in their habitat, galaxies in the universe, the sequence of human genes, and the fitness in…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2012-05-17 Zhanshan Sam Ma

In [arXiv:1404.1461], Yan and Minnhagen argue that the scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions proposed in [New J. Phys. 15 093033, arXiv:1303.0705] is "fundamentally incorrect" and "fundamentally…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-05-02 Francesc Font-Clos , Álvaro Corral

We study a few dynamical systems composed of many components whose sizes evolve according to multiplicative stochastic rules. We compare them with respect to the emergence of power laws in the size distribution of their components. We show…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Aharon Blank , Sorin Solomon

In the study of complex networks (systems), the scaling phenomenon of flow fluctuations refers to a certain power-law between the mean flux (activity) $<F_i>$ of the $i$th node and its variance $\sigma_i$ as $\sigma_i \propto < F_{i} >…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-05-08 Yudong Chen , Li Li , Yi Zhang , Jianming Hu

This paper studies the limits of language models' statistical learning in the context of Zipf's law. First, we demonstrate that Zipf-law token distribution emerges irrespective of the chosen tokenization. Second, we show that Zipf…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Elizaveta Zhemchuzhina , Nikolai Filippov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

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

Certain fluctuations in particle number at fixed total energy lead exactly to a cut-power law distribution in the one-particle energy, via the induced fluctuations in the phase-space volume ratio. The temperature parameter is expressed…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2014-12-10 Tamas Sandor Biro , Peter Van , Gergely Gabor Barnafoldi , Karoly Urmossy

The Law of Large Numbers tells us that as the sample size (N) is increased, the sample mean converges on the population mean, provided that the latter exists. In this paper, we investigate the opposite effect: keeping the sample size fixed…

Probability · Mathematics 2008-03-28 Kieran Kelly , Przemyslaw Repetowicz , Seosamh macReamoinn

Taylor's power law states that the variance function decays as a power law. It is observed for population densities of species in ecology. For random networks another power law, that is, the power law degree distribution is widely studied.…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-01-10 István Fazekas , Csaba Noszály , Noémi Uzonyi

Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2017-10-19 Silvia Zaoli , Andrea Giometto , Amos Maritan , Andrea Rinaldo

We discuss several models in order to shed light on the origin of power-law distributions and power-law correlations in financial time series. From an empirical point of view, the exponents describing the tails of the price increments…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2007-05-23 Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2009-11-11 S. Pigolotti , A. Flammini , M. Marsili , A. Maritan

The fluctuation theorem characterizes the distribution of the dissipation in nonequilibrium systems and proves that the average dissipation will be positive. For a large system with no external source of fluctuation, fluctuations in…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-12-18 Guillaume Michel , Debra J. Searles