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Related papers: Bias in Zipf's Law Estimators

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Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a family of computational techniques in Bayesian statistics. These techniques allow to fi t a model to data without relying on the computation of the model likelihood. They instead require to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-12-27 Maxime Lenormand , Franck Jabot , Guillaume Deffuant

We model the generation of words with independent unequal probabilities of occurrence of letters. We prove that the probability $p(r)$ of occurrence of words of rank $r$ has a power asymptotics. As distinct from the paper published earlier…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-05-27 V. V. Bochkarev , E. Yu. Lerner

For nearly any challenging scientific problem evaluation of the likelihood is problematic if not impossible. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) allows us to employ the whole Bayesian formalism to problems where we can use simulations…

Computation · Statistics 2011-07-04 Chris Barnes , Sarah Filippi , Michael P. H. Stumpf , Thomas Thorne

Zipf's law is a fundamental paradigm in the statistics of written and spoken natural language as well as in other communication systems. We raise the question of the elementary units for which Zipf's law should hold in the most natural way,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-07-14 Alvaro Corral , Gemma Boleda , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Michael Ramscar

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

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

Zipf's law predicts a power-law relationship between word rank and frequency in language communication systems, and is widely reported in texts yet remains enigmatic as to its origins. Computer simulations have shown that language…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-04-04 Bohdan B. Khomtchouk , Claes Wahlestedt

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) can be viewed as an analytic approximation of an intractable likelihood coupled with an elementary simulation step. Such a view, combined with a suitable instrumental prior distribution permits…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-01-04 F. J. Rubio , Adam M. Johansen

We state the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in terms of preference elicitation, resulting in a principled (Bayesian) statistical formulation. This generalises previous work on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and allows us…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-06-30 Constantin Rothkopf , Christos Dimitrakakis

A maximum likelihood methodology for a general class of models is presented, using an approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) approach. The typical target of ABC methods are models with intractable likelihoods, and we combine an ABC-MCMC…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-16 Umberto Picchini , Rachele Anderson

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods perform inference on model-specific parameters of mechanistically motivated parametric statistical models when evaluating likelihoods is difficult. Central to the success of ABC methods is…

Computation · Statistics 2013-01-29 Erkan O. Buzbas , Noah A. Rosenberg

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) or likelihood-free inference algorithms are used to find approximations to posterior distributions without making explicit use of the likelihood function, depending instead on simulation of sample data…

Computation · Statistics 2015-09-08 Richard D. Wilkinson

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) provides methods for Bayesian inference in simulation-based stochastic models which do not permit tractable likelihoods. We present a new ABC method which uses probabilistic neural emulator networks to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-21 Jan-Matthis Lueckmann , Giacomo Bassetto , Theofanis Karaletsos , Jakob H. Macke

An important body of quantitative linguistics is constituted by a series of statistical laws about language usage. Despite the importance of these linguistic laws, some of them are poorly formulated, and, more importantly, there is no…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-11-09 Alvaro Corral , Isabel Serra

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) have become a essential tool for the analysis of complex stochastic models. Earlier, Grelaud et al. (2009) advocated the use of ABC for Bayesian model choice in the specific case of Gibbs random…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-19 Christian P. Robert , Jean-Marie Cornuet , Jean-Michel Marin , Natesh Pillai

Zipf's law of abbreviation, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, is one of the most solid candidates for a linguistic universal, in the sense that it has the potential for being exceptionless or with a number of exceptions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Sonia Petrini , Antoni Casas-i-Muñoz , Jordi Cluet-i-Martinell , Mengxue Wang , Chris Bentz , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Both Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) and composite likelihood methods are useful for Bayesian and frequentist inference, respectively, when the likelihood function is intractable. We propose to use composite likelihood score…

Computation · Statistics 2015-02-25 Erlis Ruli , Nicola Sartori , Laura Ventura

The Rician distribution, a well-known statistical distribution frequently encountered in fields like magnetic resonance imaging and wireless communications, is particularly useful for describing many real phenomena such as signal process…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-30 Jesus Enrique Achire Quispe , Eduardo Ramos , Pedro Luiz Ramos

We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Vladimir Berman