A Universal Rank-Size Law

A mere hyperbolic law, like the Zipf’s law power function, is often inadequate to describe rank-size relationships. An alternative theoretical distribution is proposed based on theoretical physics arguments starting from the Yule-Simon distribution. A modeling is proposed leading to a universal form...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ausloos, Marcel, Cerqueti, Roy
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2016
Materias:
Research Article
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5094590/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27812192
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166011
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author Ausloos, Marcel
Cerqueti, Roy
author_facet Ausloos, Marcel
Cerqueti, Roy
author_sort Ausloos, Marcel
collection PubMed
description A mere hyperbolic law, like the Zipf’s law power function, is often inadequate to describe rank-size relationships. An alternative theoretical distribution is proposed based on theoretical physics arguments starting from the Yule-Simon distribution. A modeling is proposed leading to a universal form. A theoretical suggestion for the “best (or optimal) distribution”, is provided through an entropy argument. The ranking of areas through the number of cities in various countries and some sport competition ranking serves for the present illustrations.
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spelling pubmed-50945902016-11-18 A Universal Rank-Size Law Ausloos, Marcel Cerqueti, Roy PLoS One Research Article A mere hyperbolic law, like the Zipf’s law power function, is often inadequate to describe rank-size relationships. An alternative theoretical distribution is proposed based on theoretical physics arguments starting from the Yule-Simon distribution. A modeling is proposed leading to a universal form. A theoretical suggestion for the “best (or optimal) distribution”, is provided through an entropy argument. The ranking of areas through the number of cities in various countries and some sport competition ranking serves for the present illustrations. Public Library of Science 2016-11-03 /pmc/articles/PMC5094590/ /pubmed/27812192 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166011 Text en © 2016 Ausloos, Cerqueti http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Ausloos, Marcel
Cerqueti, Roy
A Universal Rank-Size Law
title A Universal Rank-Size Law
title_full A Universal Rank-Size Law
title_fullStr A Universal Rank-Size Law
title_full_unstemmed A Universal Rank-Size Law
title_short A Universal Rank-Size Law
title_sort universal rank-size law
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5094590/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27812192
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166011
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