Related papers: Dynamical approach to Zipf's law

The science of cities seeks to understand and explain regularities observed in the world's major urban systems. Modelling the population evolution of cities is at the core of this science and of all urban studies. Quantitatively, the most…

Zipf's law is the most common statistical distribution displaying scaling behavior. Cities, populations or firms are just examples of this seemingly universal law. Although many different models have been proposed, no general theoretical…

Zipf's law describes the empirical size distribution of the components of many systems in natural and social sciences and humanities. We show, by solving a statistical model, that Zipf's law co-occurs with the maximization of the diversity…

A new angle of view is proposed to find the simple rules dominating complex systems and regular patterns behind random phenomena such as cities. Hierarchy of cities reflects the ubiquitous structure frequently observed in the natural world…

Urban scaling and Zipf's law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about…

Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…

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…

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…

The rank-size distribution of cities follows Zipf's law, and the Zipf scaling exponent often tends to a constant 1. This seems to be a general rule. However, a recent numerical experiment shows that there exists a contradiction between the…

Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…

Two fundamental issues surrounding research on Zipf's law regarding city sizes are whether and why this law holds. This paper does not deal with the latter issue with respect to why, and instead investigates whether Zipf's law holds in a…

Stochastic equations constitute a major ingredient in many branches of science, from physics to biology and engineering. Not surprisingly, they appear in many quantitative studies of complex systems. In particular, this type of equation is…

Zipf's law can be used to describe the rank-size distribution of cities in a region. It was seldom employed to research urban internal structure. In this paper, we demonstrate that the space-filling process within a city follows Zipf's law…

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…

This paper provides a new geospatial perspective on whether or not Zipf's law holds for all cities or for the largest cities in the United States using a massive dataset and its computing. A major problem around this issue is how to define…

Power law distributions characterise several natural and social phenomena. The Zipf law for cities is one of those. The study views the question of whether that global regularity is independent of different spatial distributions of cities.…

We address the role of multiplicative stochastic processes in modeling the occurrence of power-law city size distributions. As an explanation of the result of Zipf's rank analysis, Simon's model is presented in a mathematically elementary…

Power-law distributions with various exponents are studied. We first introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. We can regard this model both as the time evolution of the population of cities and that of the asset…

Zipf's law states that the number of firms with size greater than S is inversely proportional to S. Most explanations start with Gibrat's rule of proportional growth but require additional constraints. We show that Gibrat's rule, at all…

Natural languages are full of rules and exceptions. One of the most famous quantitative rules is Zipf's law which states that the frequency of occurrence of a word is approximately inversely proportional to its rank. Though this `law' of…