The likely determines the unlikely

DOI10.1016/J.PHYSA.2016.03.027MaRDI QIDQ1619558zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Xiaoyong Yan, Petter Minnhagen, Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen

Publication date 13 November 2018

Published in Physica A (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05272

zbMATH Keywords

maximum entropycomplex systemsreal datapredictionsfrequency distributions

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Geostatistics (86A32) Stochastic systems in control theory (general) (93E03)

Abstract: We point out that the functional form describing the frequency of sizes of events in complex systems (e.g. earthquakes, forest fires, bursts of neuronal activity) can be obtained from maximal likelihood inference, which, remarkably, only involve a few available observed measures such as number of events, total event size and extremes. Most importantly, the method is able to predict with high accuracy the frequency of the rare extreme events. To be able to predict the few, often big impact events, from the frequent small events is of course of great general importance. For a data set of wind speed we are able to predict the frequency of gales with good precision. We analyse several examples ranging from the shortest length of a recruit to the number of Chinese characters which occur only once in a text.

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Cites work

• Critical phenomena in natural sciences. Chaos, fractals, selforganization and disorder: concepts and tools
• Elements of Information Theory
• Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics
• Maximum Entropy and Ecology
• Probability Theory
• The ten thousand Kims
• Zipf's law unzipped

Cited in

(4)

• Estimating the historical and future probabilities of large terrorist events
• Mineral species frequency distribution conforms to a large number of rare events model: prediction of Earth's missing minerals
• Entropy inference of recurrence models for variability analysis of extreme events
• Unlikely Candidate—Unexpected Entry [Historical Perspectives]

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