Related papers: Maximal Diversity and Zipf's Law
A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so…
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…
We show that the laws of Zipf and Benford, obeyed by scores of numerical data generated by many and diverse kinds of natural phenomena and human activity are related to the focal expression of a generalized thermodynamic structure. This…
In this article, the relationship between two well-accepted empirical propositions regarding the distribution of population in cities, namely, Gibrat's law and Zipf's law, are rigorously examined using the Chinese census data. Our findings…
Biological systems with many components often exhibit seemingly critical behaviors, characterized by atypically large correlated fluctuations. Yet the underlying causes remain unclear. Here we define and examine two types of criticality.…
The derivation of the maximum entropy distribution of particles in boxes yields two kinds of distributions: a "bell-like" distribution and a long-tail distribution. The first one is obtained when the ratio between particles and boxes is…
Zipf's law is one the most conspicuous empirical facts for cities, however, there is no convincing explanation for the scaling relation between rank and size and its scaling exponent. Based on the idea from general fractals and scaling,…
Evidence is given for a systematic text-length dependence of the power-law index gamma of a single book. The estimated gamma values are consistent with a monotonic decrease from 2 to 1 with increasing length of a text. A direct connection…
The frequency distributions of DNA k-mers are shaped by fundamental biological processes and offer a window into genome structure and evolution. Inspired by analogies to natural language, prior studies have attempted to model genomic k-mer…
We propose a continuum model for the degree distribution of directed networks in free and open-source software. The degree distributions of links in both the in-directed and out-directed dependency networks follow Zipf's law for the…
Zipf's law predicts a power-law relationship between word rank and frequency in language communication systems and has been widely reported in a variety of natural language processing applications. However, the emergence of natural language…
The law of proportionate growth simply states that the time dependent change of a quantity $x$ is proportional to $x$. Its applicability to a wide range of dynamic phenomena is based on various assumptions for the proportionality factor,…
This article presents the calculation of the entropy of a system with Zipfian distribution and shows that a communication system tends to present an exponent value close to one, but still greater than one, so that it might maximize entropy…
Zipf's law establishes a scaling behavior for word-frequencies in large text corpora. The appearance of Zipfian properties in human language has been previously explained as an optimization problem for the interests of speakers and hearers.…
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…
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…
We show how generalized Gibbs-Shannon entropies can provide new insights on the statistical properties of texts. The universal distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) implies that the generalized entropies, computed at the word level,…
There are different ways of measuring diversity in complex systems. In particular, in language, lexical diversity is characterized in terms of the type-token ratio and the word entropy. We here investigate both diversity metrics in six…
We study a few dynamical systems composed of many components whose sizes evolve according to multiplicative stochastic rules. We compare them with respect to the emergence of power laws in the size distribution of their components. We show…
Heap's Law states that in a large enough text corpus, the number of types as a function of tokens grows as $N=KM^\beta$ for some free parameters $K,\beta$. Much has been written about how this result and various generalizations can be…