Critical Truths About Power Laws

By M. P. Stumpf, M. A. Porter. Science, 2012

618 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2498365dbff51d041c04b1a75d3f6619d11480b9

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Citations in the corpus

Being Critical of Criticality in the Brain (2012, background): “People have written entire articles devoted largely to this topic (Mitzenmacher, 2004; Newman, 2005; Stumpf and Porter, 2012).”
Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: A critical review and future directions (2014, background): “Unfortunately, essentially all of the work in language research has focused solely on deriving the law itself in principle; very little work has attempted to assess the underlying assumptions of the hypothesized explanation, a problem for much work on power laws in science (Stumpf & Porter, 2012).”
25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Solar and Astrophysics (2014, background): “These well-understood effects should be taken into account in arguments countering power laws and their validity and interpretation, as expressed by Stumpf and Porter (2012).”
Power-law distributions in binned empirical data (2012, background): “This perspective has a long and ongoing history, reaching at least as far back as Ijiri and Simon (1977), with modern analogs given by Mitzenmacher (2006) and by Stumpf and Porter (2012).”
Fitting Heavy Tailed Distributions: The poweRlaw Package (2014, background): “Stumpf and Porter (2012) correctly highlight that many supposed power law relationships are at best dubious and some obviously false.”
Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems (2017, background): “For some authors they reveal fundamental mechanisms, while some others perceive them as largely uninformative (Kello et al., 2010; Stumpf and Porter, 2012) or even “more-normal-than-normal” distributions (Willinger et al., 2004).”
Data‐driven spatial b value estimation with applications to California seismicity: To b or not to b (2015, background): “This is also why, as a rule of thumb, any candidate power law is required to span at least 2 orders of magnitude in both x and y axes [Stumpf and Porter, 2012].”
Finding the core: Network structure in interbank markets (2014, neutral): “However, the statistical support for many of these claims has recently been called into question (Stumpf and Porter [29]).”
Understanding movements of organisms: it's time to abandon the Lévy foraging hypothesis (2015, background): “…scenarios and there may be general differences between foraging scenarios that lead to L evy vs. non-L evy step length distributions, which would bemost interesting as predicting and/or observing L evy distributions at large spatial scales would otherwise seem pretty trivial (Stumpf & Porter 2012).”
The spectral exponent of the resting EEG indexes the presence of consciousness during unresponsiveness induced by propofol, xenon, and ketamine (2019, neutral): “A singular scaling regime should be observed for at least two-orders of magnitude 611 for both x and y axis, in order to have the statistical support to declare that a genuine power-law 612 relationship exists [112].”
Limit order books (2010, methodology): “2009, Stumpf and Porter 2012). Many authors use ordinary least-squares regression on a log–log plot to estimate power-law exponents from LOB data, yet Clauset et al. (2009) showed that this method produces significant system-”