When is Menzerath-Altmann law mathematically trivial? A new approach

DOI10.1515/SAGMB-2013-0034zbMATH Open1302.92066arXiv1210.6599OpenAlexW3098910460WikidataQ30369686 ScholiaQ30369686MaRDI QIDQ482811FDOQ482811

Ján Mačutek, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, Jaume Baixeries, Łukasz Dębowski, Antoni Hernández-Fernández

Publication date: 6 January 2015

Published in: Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Menzerath's law, the tendency of Z, the mean size of the parts, to decrease as X, the number of parts, increases is found in language, music and genomes. Recently, it has been argued that the presence of the law in genomes is an inevitable consequence of the fact that Z = Y/X, which would imply that Z scales with X as Z ~ 1/X. That scaling is a very particular case of Menzerath-Altmann law that has been rejected by means of a correlation test between X and Y in genomes, being X the number of chromosomes of a species, Y its genome size in bases and Z the mean chromosome size. Here we review the statistical foundations of that test and consider three non-parametric tests based upon different correlation metrics and one parametric test to evaluate if Z ~ 1/X in genomes. The most powerful test is a new non-parametric based upon the correlation ratio, which is able to reject Z ~ 1/X in nine out of eleven taxonomic groups and detect a borderline group. Rather than a fact, Z ~ 1/X is a baseline that real genomes do not meet. The view of Menzerath-Altmann law as inevitable is seriously flawed.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.6599

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zbMATH Keywords

Monte Carlo methodsMenzerath-Altmann lawgenomespower-laws

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Nonparametric hypothesis testing (62G10) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Genetics and epigenetics (92D10)

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Uses Software

• nlrwr

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