Related papers: Maximal Diversity and Zipf's Law
The availability of large datasets requires an improved view on statistical laws in complex systems, such as Zipf's law of word frequencies, the Gutenberg-Richter law of earthquake magnitudes, or scale-free degree distribution in networks.…
When following a sequence - such as reading a text or tracking a user's activity - one can measure how the "dictionary" of distinct elements (types) grows with the number of observations (tokens). When this growth follows a power law, it is…
Zipf's law states that the probability of a variable being larger than $s$ is roughly inversely proportional to $s$. In this paper, we evaluate Zipf's law for the distribution of firm size by the number of employees in Brazil. We use…
The problem of compression in standard information theory consists of assigning codes as short as possible to numbers. Here we consider the problem of optimal coding -- under an arbitrary coding scheme -- and show that it predicts Zipf's…
A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:…
Zipf's law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…
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…
Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are two representatives of the scaling concepts, which play a significant role in the study of complexity science. The coexistence of the Zipf's law and the Heaps' law motivates different understandings…
Zipf's law, and power laws in general, have attracted and continue to attract considerable attention in a wide variety of disciplines - from astronomy to demographics to software structure to economics to linguistics to zoology, and even…
We explore a probabilistic model of an artistic text: words of the text are chosen independently of each other in accordance with a discrete probability distribution on an infinite dictionary. The words are enumerated 1, 2, $\ldots$, and…
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…
Zipf's law is a paradigm describing the importance of different elements in communication systems, especially in linguistics. Despite the complexity of the hierarchical structure of language, music has in some sense an even more complex…
We study a resource utilization scenario characterized by intrinsic fitness. To describe the growth and organization of different cities, we consider a model for resource utilization where many restaurants compete, as in a game, to attract…
Languages across the world exhibit Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely more frequent words tend to be shorter. The generalized version of the law - an inverse relationship between the frequency of a unit and its magnitude - holds also for…
When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…
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…
Zipf's, Heaps' and Taylor's laws are ubiquitous in many different systems where innovation processes are at play. Together, they represent a compelling set of stylized facts regarding the overall statistics, the innovation rate and the…
Fractals, 1/f noise, Zipf's law, and the occurrence of large catastrophic events are typical ubiquitous general empirical observations across the individual sciences which cannot be understood within the set of references developed within…
Research collaborations provide the foundation for scientific advances, but we have only recently begun to understand how they form and grow on a global scale. Here we analyze a model of the growth of research collaboration networks to…
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…