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Power-law distributions are essential in computational and statistical investigations of extreme events and complex systems. The usual technique to generate power-law distributed data is to first infer the scale exponent $\alpha$ using the…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2022-06-15 Jack Murdoch Moore , Gang Yan , Eduardo G. Altmann

Extreme events such as earthquakes, floods, and power blackouts often display burst phenomena where multiple extreme events occur in quick succession or in bunches. This study examines bunching of extreme events on a complex network using a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-09-24 Sarvesh K. Upadhyay , Vimal Kishore , Sanjay Kumar , R. E. Amritkar

Extreme weather is one of the main mechanisms through which climate change will directly impact human society. Coping with such change as a global community requires markedly improved understanding of how global warming drives extreme…

Computational Physics · Physics 2019-09-18 Adam Rupe , Karthik Kashinath , Nalini Kumar , Victor Lee , Prabhat , James P. Crutchfield

Some issues relevant for the formation of supermassive black holes are discused and estimates of the event rates for the emission of gravitational waves by coalescing supermassive black hole binaries are given. The models take into account…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-30 Martin G. Haehnelt

We propose and compare methods for the analysis of extreme events in complex systems governed by PDEs that involve random parameters, in situations where we are interested in quantifying the probability that a scalar function of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-12 Shanyin Tong , Eric Vanden-Eijnden , Georg Stadler

Rare weather and climate events, such as heat waves and floods, can bring tremendous social costs. Climate data is often limited in duration and spatial coverage, and climate forecasting has often turned to simulations of climate models to…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-05-18 Meagan Carney , Holger Kantz , Matthew Nicol

In gravitational-wave astronomy, as in other scientific disciplines, ``exceptional'' sources attract considerable interest because they challenge our current understanding of the underlying (astro)physical processes. Crucially,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-01-07 Rodrigo Tenorio , Davide Gerosa

The shape of empirical distributions with heavy tails is a recurrent matter of debate. There are claims of a power laws and the associated scale invariance. There are plenty of challengers as well, the lognormal and stretched exponential…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-11-28 Alexei Vazquez

We review briefly the concepts underlying complex systems and probability distributions. The later are often taken as the first quantitative characteristics of complex systems, allowing one to detect the possible occurrence of regularities…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2007-07-17 D. Sornette

The frequency of disruptive and newly emerging threats (e.g. man-made attacks--cyber and physical attacks; extreme natural events--hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods) has escalated dramatically in the last decade. Impacts of these events…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-08 Narayan Bhusal , Mukesh Gautam , Michael Abdelmalak , Mohammed Benidris

Extreme event are sudden large-amplitude changes in the state or observables of chaotic nonlinear systems, which characterize many scientific phenomena. Because of their violent nature, extreme events typically have adverse consequences,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Alberto Racca , Luca Magri

We develop a discrete-event modeling framework that captures the progression of geophysical systems toward catastrophic failure through sequences of distinct damage events. By representing system evolution as a succession of temporally…

Geophysics · Physics 2025-07-31 Qinghua Lei , Didier Sornette

English words and the outputs of many other natural processes are well-known to follow a Zipf distribution. Yet this thoroughly-established property has never been shown to help compress or predict these important processes. We show that…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-05-04 Moein Falahatgar , Ashkan Jafarpour , Alon Orlitsky , Venkatadheeraj Pichapati , Ananda Theertha Suresh

This paper studies binary logistic regression for rare events data, or imbalanced data, where the number of events (observations in one class, often called cases) is significantly smaller than the number of nonevents (observations in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-02 HaiYing Wang

Two recent papers\citep{xmri1, xmri2} revealed that in our Galaxy there are very extreme-mass-ratio inspirals composed by brown dwarfs and the supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy. The event rates estimated in these papers…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2020-10-22 Wen-Biao Han , Xing-Yu Zhong , Xian Chen , Shuo Xin

Typically, in the dynamical theory of extremal events, the function that gauges the intensity of a phenomenon is assumed to be convex and maximal, or singular, at a single, or at most a finite collection of points in phase--space. In this…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2016-09-21 Giorgio Mantica , Luca Perotti

In this work, we report the emergence of extreme events in a damped and driven velocity-dependent mechanical system. We observe that the extreme events emerge at multiple points. We further notice that the extreme events occur symmetrically…

Chaotic Dynamics · Physics 2021-06-18 Sudharsan S , Venkatesan A , Senthilvelan M

Gray swans, plausible but unobserved extreme events, broaden our understanding of the range of hazards beyond those observed during the short observational record. They are useful for dynamical studies, synthetic training data, emergency…

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics · Physics 2026-04-02 Gregory J. Hakim , Aishwarya Agrawal

As the catalogue of gravitational-wave transients grows, several entries appear "exceptional" within the population. Tipping the scales with a total mass of $\approx 150 M_\odot$, GW190521 likely contained black holes in the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-05-11 Lachlan Passenger , Eric Thrane , Paul D. Lasky , Ethan Payne , Simon Stevenson , Ben Farr

Mass violence, almost no matter how defined, is (thankfully) rare. Rare events are very difficult to study in a systematic manner. Standard statistical procedures can fail badly and usefully accurate forecasts of rare events often are…

Applications · Statistics 2019-03-05 Richard A. Berk , Susan B. Sorenson