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Related papers: Testing statistical laws in complex systems

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The task of finding a criterion allowing to distinguish a text from an arbitrary set of words is rather relevant in itself, for instance, in the aspect of development of means for internet-content indexing or separating signals and noise in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2007-10-02 D. V. Lande , A. A. Snarskii

The joint probability distribution of many degrees of freedom in biological systems, such as firing patterns in neural networks or antibody sequence composition in zebrafish, often follow Zipf's law, where a power law is observed on a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-08-13 David J. Schwab , Ilya Nemenman , Pankaj Mehta

We analyse correspondence of a text to a simple probabilistic model. The model assumes that the words are selected independently from an infinite dictionary. The probability distribution correspond to the Zipf---Mandelbrot law. We count…

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

In many empirical studies of a large two-sided matching market (such as in a college admissions problem), the researcher performs statistical inference under the assumption that they observe a random sample from a large matching market. In…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-04-02 Jacob Schwartz , Kyungchul Song

According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-10-14 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Long-range correlations are found in symbolic sequences from human language, music and DNA. Determining the span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences is crucial for shedding light on their communicative complexity. Dolphin whistles…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-12-03 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Brenda McCowan

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

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-01-22 Dmitrii Manin

History-dependent processes are ubiquitous in natural and social systems. Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-04-16 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

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

The record statistics of complex random states are analytically calculated, and shown that the probability of a record intensity is a Bernoulli process. The correlation due to normalization leads to a probability distribution of the records…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-05 Shashi C. L. Srivastava , Arul Lakshminarayan , Sudhir R. Jain

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

We inspect the deductive connection between the neural scaling law and Zipf's law -- two statements discussed in machine learning and quantitative linguistics. The neural scaling law describes how the cross entropy rate of a foundation…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Łukasz Dębowski

The Zipf's law establishes that if the words of a (large) text are ordered by decreasing frequency, the frequency versus the rank decreases as a power law with exponent close to $-1$. Previous work has stressed that this pattern arises from…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-04-03 Felipe Urbina , Javier Vera

We show that statistical criticality, i.e. the occurrence of power law frequency distributions, arises in samples that are maximally informative about the underlying generating process. In order to reach this conclusion, we first identify…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2019-07-09 Ryan John Cubero , Junghyo Jo , Matteo Marsili , Yasser Roudi , Juyong Song

Most of various large-size complex systems in nature and society can be well described as complex networks (graphs) to better understand the evolutional mechanisms and dynamical functions behind themselves. Of some part follow scale-free…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-08-08 Fei Ma

Here we sketch a new derivation of Zipf's law for word frequencies based on optimal coding. The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot's random typing model but it has multiple advantages over random typing: (1) it starts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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

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