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It is traditionally assumed that Zipf's law implies the power-law growth of the number of different elements with the total number of elements in a system - the so-called Heaps' law. We show that a careful definition of Zipf's law leads to…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-17 Francesc Font-Clos , Alvaro Corral

The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household ($\sim 10^{-2}$ km) to continental ($\sim 10^4$ km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-03-23 Henry W. Lin , Abraham Loeb

The rank-size regularity known as Zipf's law is one of scaling laws and frequently observed within the natural living world and in social institutions. Many scientists tried to derive the rank-size scaling relation by entropy-maximizing…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-21 Yanguang Chen

Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-09-26 Charlotte James , Sandro Azaele , Amos Maritan , Filippo Simini

Stochastic equations constitute a major ingredient in many branches of science, from physics to biology and engineering. Not surprisingly, they appear in many quantitative studies of complex systems. In particular, this type of equation is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-08-02 Marc Barthelemy

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 has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Shuiyuan Yu , Chunshan Xu , Haitao Liu

Natural languages are full of rules and exceptions. One of the most famous quantitative rules is Zipf's law which states that the frequency of occurrence of a word is approximately inversely proportional to its rank. Though this `law' of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-05-27 Jake Ryland Williams , James P. Bagrow , Christopher M. Danforth , Peter Sheridan Dodds

With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-03-05 Jake Ryland Williams , Paul R. Lessard , Suma Desu , Eric Clark , James P. Bagrow , Christopher M. Danforth , Peter Sheridan Dodds

Power-law distributions with various exponents are studied. We first introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. We can regard this model both as the time evolution of the population of cities and that of the asset…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Kenji Kawamura , Naomichi Hatano

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

In a prime number decomposition of integers in a given set, the occurrence frequencies of prime numbers are shown to satisfy a general forms of Zipf's law.

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-03-20 Helmut Satz

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-04-16 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

Data of proportional elections show a striking feature: If the parties are ranked according to the number of their voters, the number of votes grows exponentially with the rank of the party. This so-called Zipf's law has been reported…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-03-30 Volker Hösel , Johannes Müller , Aurélien Tellier

We checked that the distribution of words in text should uniform, which gives Heaps' law as natural result, that is, the number of types of words can be expressed as a power law of the number of tokens within text. We developed a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-04-16 Kim Chol-jun

The Zipf's law establishes that if the words of a (large) text are ordered by decreasing frequency, the frequency versus the rank decreases as a power law with exponent close to $-1$. Previous work has stressed that this pattern arises from…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-04-03 Felipe Urbina , Javier Vera

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-05-10 Matt Visser

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-11-20 Marc Serra-Peralta , Joan Serrà , Álvaro Corral

Although Zipf's law is widespread in natural and social data, one often encounters situations where one or both ends of the ranked data deviate from the power-law function. Previously we proposed the Beta rank function to improve the…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2017-05-03 Oscar Fontanelli , Pedro Miramontes , Yaning Yang , Germinal Cocho , Wentian Li

Urban scaling and Zipf's law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-11-18 Haroldo V. Ribeiro , Milena Oehlers , Ana I. Moreno-Monroy , Jurgen P. Kropp , Diego Rybski