Posts tagged ‘power law’

[ArXiv] 1st week, Apr. 2008

I’m very curious how astronomers began to use Monte Carlo Markov Chain instead of Markov chain Monte Carlo. The more it becomes popular, the more frequently Monte Carlo Markov Chain appears. Anyway, this week, I added non astrostatistical papers in the list: a tutorial, big bang, and biblical theology. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 1st week, Apr. 2008’ »

Everything you wanted to know about power-laws but were afraid to ask

Clauset, Shalizi, & Newman (2007, arXiv/0706.1062) have a very detailed description of what power-law distributions are, how to recognize them, how to fit them, etc. They are also making available their matlab and R codes that they use to do the fitting and such.

Looks like a very handy reference text, though I am a bit uncertain about their use of the K-S test to check whether a dataset can be described with a power-law or not. It is probably fine; perhaps some statisticians would care to comment?