Zipf's law from a Fisher variational-principle

DOI10.1016/J.PHYSLETA.2009.10.027MaRDI QIDQ763770zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors A. Hernando, D. Puigdomènech, D. Villuendas, C. Vesperinas, A. Plastino

Publication date 2 April 2012

Published in Physics Letters. A (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.0501

zbMATH Keywords

Fisher informationZipf's lawscale-invariance

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Measures of information, entropy (94A17) Variational principles of physics (49S05) Classical equilibrium statistical mechanics (general) (82B05)

Abstract: 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 we show that the number of citations found in the most referenced physics journals follows this law.

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Cites work

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4103007 (Why is no real title available?)
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• A lower bound for Fisher's information measure
• Fisher information as a measure of time
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• Physical symmetries and Fisher's information measure
• Statistical mechanics of complex networks
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Cited in

(13)

• Study of a measure of efficiency as a tool for applying the principle of least effort to the derivation of the Zipf and the Pareto laws
• Quantum trajectories emerging from classical phase space
• Analysis of an information-theoretic model for communication
• Zipf's law unzipped
• Zipf's law, power laws and maximum entropy
• Universality of Zipf's Law
• Fisher information, the Hellmann-Feynman theorem, and the Jaynes reciprocity relations
• Fisher information and quantum potential well model for finance
• Zipf's law and L. Levin probability distributions
• Zipf law: an extreme perspective
• Unravelling the size distribution of social groups with information theory in complex networks
• On the universality of rank distributions of website popularity
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1462670 (Why is no real title available?)

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