Zipf's law
E595317
Zipf's law is an empirical statistical principle observing that in many datasets, such as word frequencies in natural language, the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency table.
Statements (49)
| Predicate | Object |
|---|---|
| instanceOf |
empirical law
ⓘ
power law ⓘ statistical law ⓘ |
| appliesTo |
city size distributions
ⓘ
income distributions ⓘ internet traffic ⓘ natural language text ⓘ population of cities ⓘ scientific paper citations ⓘ web site popularity ⓘ word frequency distributions ⓘ |
| approximateDate | 1940s ⓘ |
| category |
empirical statistical laws
ⓘ
laws of linguistics ⓘ |
| coreStatement | the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its rank ⓘ |
| describes |
heavy-tailed distributions
ⓘ
scale-free behavior ⓘ |
| explainedBy | principle of least effort ⓘ |
| field |
complex systems
ⓘ
information theory ⓘ quantitative linguistics ⓘ statistical linguistics ⓘ |
| hasGeneralization |
Zipf–Mandelbrot law
NERFINISHED
ⓘ
discrete Pareto distribution ⓘ |
| mathematicalForm |
f(r) = C / r^s
ⓘ
f(r) ∝ 1/r ⓘ |
| namedAfter | George Kingsley Zipf NERFINISHED ⓘ |
| originatedBy | George Kingsley Zipf NERFINISHED ⓘ |
| property |
approximate rather than exact
ⓘ
empirically observed ⓘ scale invariant form ⓘ |
| publicationContext | Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort NERFINISHED ⓘ |
| relatedTo |
Benford's law
NERFINISHED
ⓘ
Heaps' law NERFINISHED ⓘ Pareto distribution NERFINISHED ⓘ power-law distribution ⓘ rank-size rule ⓘ |
| typicalExponent | s ≈ 1 ⓘ |
| usedIn |
computational linguistics
ⓘ
corpus linguistics ⓘ data compression ⓘ economics ⓘ information retrieval ⓘ language modeling ⓘ natural language processing ⓘ network science ⓘ urban studies ⓘ |
| variable |
frequency
ⓘ
rank ⓘ |
Referenced by (2)
Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.