English
Related papers

Related papers: Big Data and Large Numbers. Interpreting Zipf's La…

200 papers

Recent works have highlighted optimization difficulties faced by gradient descent in training the first and last layers of transformer-based language models, which are overcome by optimizers such as Adam. These works suggest that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Frederik Kunstner , Francis Bach

Demographic noise causes unlimited population growth in a broad class of models which, without noise, would predict a stable finite population. We study this effect on the example of a stochastic birth-death model which includes…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2014-08-06 Baruch Meerson , Pavel V. Sasorov

Ranking systems are widely used to simplify and interpret complex data across diverse domains, from economic indicators and sports scores to online content popularity. While previous studies including the Zipf's law have focused on the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-06-30 Hyun-Woo Lee , Gerardo Iñiguez , Hang-Hyun Jo , Hye Jin Park

The growth dynamics of complex systems often exhibit statistical regularities involving power-law relationships. For real finite complex systems formed by countable tokens (animals, words) as instances of distinct types (species, dictionary…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-03-31 Pablo Rosillo-Rodes , Laurent Hébert-Dufresne , Peter Sheridan Dodds

Big data has ushered in a new wave of predictive power using machine learning models. In this work, we assess what {\it big} means in the context of typical materials-science machine-learning problems. This concerns not only data volume,…

The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-27 Shuiyuan Yu , Junying Liang , Haitao Liu

Prime numbers seem to distribute among the natural numbers with no other law than that of chance, however its global distribution presents a quite remarkable smoothness. Such interplay between randomness and regularity has motivated sci-…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2008-11-21 Bartolo Luque , Lucas Lacasa

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

Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis rely on informed probability priors to encourage good solutions. This paper empirically analyses whether text in medical discharge reports follow Zipf's law, a commonly assumed statistical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Juan C Quiroz , Liliana Laranjo , Catalin Tufanaru , Ahmet Baki Kocaballi , Dana Rezazadegan , Shlomo Berkovsky , Enrico Coiera

We analyse the statistical properties of public transport networks. These networks are defined by a set of public transport routes (bus lines) and the stations serviced by these. For larger networks these appear to possess a scale-free…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2007-05-23 C. von Ferber , Yu. Holovatch , V. Palchykov

In nature or societies, the power-law is present ubiquitously, and then it is important to investigate the mathematical characteristics of power-laws in the recent era of big data. In this paper we prove the superposition of non-identical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-04-18 Masaru Shintani , Ken Umeno

Using an exhaustive list of Japanese bankruptcy in 1997, we discover a Zipf law for the distribution of total liabilities of bankrupted firms in high debt range. The life-time of these bankrupted firms has exponential distribution in…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-10 Yoshi Fujiwara

Physics seeks to uncover the laws of Nature and express them through mathematical equations. Despite the vast diversity of natural phenomena, physical equations exhibit structural regularities that set them apart from arbitrary mathematical…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-05-11 Andrei Constantin , Deaglan Bartlett , Harry Desmond , Pedro G. Ferreira

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Neus Català , Jaume Baixeries , Ramon Ferrer-Cancho , Lluís Padró , Antoni Hernández-Fernández

Numerical data for the distribution of citations are examined for: (i) papers published in 1981 in journals which are catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information (783,339 papers) and (ii) 20 years of publications in Physical…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2011-10-11 S. Redner

We present empirical data on frequency and pattern of misprints in citations to twelve high-profile papers. We find that the distribution of misprints, ranked by frequency of their repetition, follows Zipf's law. We propose a stochastic…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2007-05-23 M. V. Simkin , V. P. Roychowdhury

We present a general approach to explain the Zipf's law of city distribution. If the simplest interaction (pairwise) is assumed, individuals tend to form cities in agreement with the well-known statistics

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-10-31 Matteo Marsili , Yi-Cheng Zhang

n-tuple power law widely exists in language, computer program code, DNA and music. After a vast amount of Zipf analyses of n-tuple power law from empirical data, we propose a model to explain the n-tuple power law feature existed in these…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-08-05 Xiaocong Gan , Dahui Wang , Zhangang Han

We show that size-rank distributions with power-law decay (often only over a limited extent) observed in a vast number of instances in a widespread family of systems obey Tsallis statistics. The theoretical framework for these distributions…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2014-09-29 G. Cigdem Yalcin , Alberto Robledo , Murray Gell-Mann

We study the rank distribution, the cumulative probability, and the probability density of returns of stock prices of listed firms traded in four stock markets. We find that the rank distribution and the cumulative probability of stock…

Other Condensed Matter · Physics 2008-12-02 Kyungsik Kim , S. -M. Yoon , K. H. Chang