Related papers: Dynamical approach to Zipf's law
A plethora of natural and socio-economic phenomena share a striking statistical regularity, that is the magnitude of elements decreases with a power law as a function of their position in a ranking of magnitude. Such regularity is known as…
It has been shown recently that a specific class of path-dependent stochastic processes, which reduce their sample space as they unfold, lead to exact scaling laws in frequency and rank distributions. Such Sample Space Reducing processes…
The origin(s) of the ubiquity of probability distribution functions (PDF) with power law tails is still a matter of fascination and investigation in many scientific fields from linguistic, social, economic, computer sciences to essentially…
Zipf's law is just one out of many universal laws proposed to describe statistical regularities in language. Here we review and critically discuss how these laws can be statistically interpreted, fitted, and tested (falsified). The modern…
It is shown that the distribution of low variability periods in the activity of human heart rate typically follows a multi-scaling Zipf's law. The presence or failure of a power law, as well as the values of the scaling exponents, are…
We present a kinetic approach to the formation of urban agglomerations which is based on simple rules of immigration and emigration. In most cases, the Boltzmann-type kinetic description allows to obtain, within an asymptotic procedure, a…
The time evolution of Earth with her cities, languages and countries is considered in terms of the multiplicative noise and the fragmentation- processes, where the related families, size distributions, lifetimes, bilinguals, etc. are…
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…
Background: Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication.…
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…
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…
Understanding quantitative relationships between urban elements is crucial for a wide range of applications. The observation at the macroscopic level demonstrates that the aggregated urban quantities (e.g., gross domestic product) scale…
Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…
The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail,…
Statistical laws describe regular patterns observed in diverse scientific domains, ranging from the magnitude of earthquakes (Gutenberg-Richter law) and metabolic rates in organisms (Kleiber's law), to the frequency distribution of words in…
We investigate into the rank-size distributions of urban agglomerations for India between 1981 to 2011. The incidence of a power law tail is prominent. A relevant question persists regarding the evolution of the power tail coefficient. We…
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…
Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…
Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and…
Cities are living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, open systems that never stop developing and sometimes die. The local geography can be compared to a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a step in…