{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/testing-statistical-laws-in-complex-systems","title":"Testing statistical laws in complex systems","arxiv_id":"1904.11624","date":"2019-04-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Martin Gerlach","Eduardo G. Altmann"],"abstract":"The availability of large datasets requires an improved view on statistical laws in complex systems, such as Zipf's law of word frequencies, the Gutenberg-Richter law of earthquake magnitudes, or scale-free degree distribution in networks. In this paper we discuss how the statistical analysis of these laws are affected by correlations present in the observations, the typical scenario for data from complex systems. We first show how standard maximum-likelihood recipes lead to false rejections of statistical laws in the presence of correlations. We then propose a conservative method (based on shuffling and under-sampling the data) to test statistical laws and find that accounting for correlations leads to smaller rejection rates and larger confidence intervals on estimated parameters.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.11624v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11624v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"testing-statistical-laws-in-complex-systems","repo_url":"https://github.com/edugalt/StatisticalLaws","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}