The exact power law and Pascal pyramid
Abstract
Let be a full set of outcomes (letters, symbols) and let positive , , be their probabilities (). Let us treat as a stop symbol; it can occur in sequences of symbols (we call them words) only once, at the very end. The probability of a word is defined as the product of probabilities of its letters. We consider the list of all possible words sorted in the non-increasing order of their probabilities. Let be the probability of the th word in this list. We prove that if at least one of ratios , , is irrational, then the limit exists and differs from zero; here is the root of the equation . Some weaker results were established earlier. We are first to write an explicit formula for this limit constant at the power function; it can be expressed (rather easily) in terms of the entropy of the distribution~.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1605.09052,
title = {The exact power law and Pascal pyramid},
author = {Vladimir V. Bochkarev and Eduard Yu. Lerner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.09052},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
19 pages