Related papers: Zipf's Law in Gene Expression
The dependence with text length of the statistical properties of word occurrences has long been considered a severe limitation quantitative linguistics. We propose a simple scaling form for the distribution of absolute word frequencies…
We propose a dynamical toy model of agents which possess a quantity and have an interaction radius depending on the amount of the quantity. They exchange the quantity with agents existing within their interaction radii. It is shown in the…
Current-day genomes bear the mark of the evolutionary processes. One of the strongest indications is the sequence homology among families of proteins that perform similar biological functions in different species. The number of proteins in…
The Zipf's law is the major regularity of statistical linguistics that served as a prototype for rank-frequency relations and scaling laws in natural sciences. Here we show that the Zipf's law -- together with its applicability for a single…
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…
In this second part of our survey on the social and natural distributions, we investigate some models, which intend to explain the statistical regularity of the natural and social distributions. There is a large variety of models and in…
Here we present a new class of optimality for coding systems. Members of that class are displaced linearly from optimal coding and thus exhibit Zipf's law, namely a power-law distribution of frequency ranks. Within that class, Zipf's law,…
With the number of sequenced genomes now over one hundred, and the availability of rough functional annotations for a substantial proportion of their genes, it has become possible to study the statistics of gene content across genomes. Here…
The advent of new experimental genomic technologies and the massive increase of DNA sequence information is helping researchers better understand how our genes work. Recently, experiments on mRNA abundance (gene expression) have revealed…
We summarize a book under publication with his title written by the three present authors, on the theory of Zipf's law, and more generally of power laws, driven by the mechanism of proportional growth. The preprint is available upon request…
The nature of the quantitative distribution of the 64 DNA codons in the human genome has been an issue of debate for over a decade. Some groups have proposed that the quantitative distribution of the DNA codons ordered as a rank-frequency…
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…
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…
Zipf's law on word frequency is observed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and so on, yet it does not hold for Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. A model for writing process is proposed to explain the above difference, which takes…
An important body of quantitative linguistics is constituted by a series of statistical laws about language usage. Despite the importance of these linguistic laws, some of them are poorly formulated, and, more importantly, there is no…
The length of coding sequence series in microbial genomes were regarded as a fluctuating system and characterized by the methods of statistical physics. The distribution and the correlatin properties of 50 genomes including bacteria and…
We discuss the meaning of Zipf's law in nuclear multifragmentation. We remark that Zipf's law is a consequence of a power law fragment size distribution with exponent $\tau \simeq 2$. We also recall why the presence of such distribution is…
In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two…
For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were attributed to…
Zipf's law is shown to arise as the variational solution of a problem formulated in Fisher's terms. An appropriate minimization process involving Fisher information and scale-invariance yields this universal rank distribution. As an example…