Talk:Power law

WikiProject Mathematics (Rated B-class, Mid-priority)
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mathematics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Mathematics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.
Mathematics rating:
 B Class
 Mid Priority
Field:  Probability and statistics
One of the 500 most frequently viewed mathematics articles.
WikiProject Statistics (Rated B-class, Mid-importance)

This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Statistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of statistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page or join the discussion.

B  This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale.
Mid  This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

Merging with other articles

I propose that our revised power law article become the redirect point for Fat tail and Heavy-tailed distribution. I've placed such a suggestion on the talk pages of each of these articles (which substantially overlap with the revised power law article, and with each other).

Paresnah 20:14, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, the Extreme value theory article, which mentions 'tail-fitting' but points to a non-existent article on the topic, should be connected to the Power laws subsection on estimating the tail exponent of power-law distributions. Paresnah 20:21, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
This latter point (linking with extreme value theory) is now done. Paresnah 01:28, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

References to terrorism

I concurr with the removal of the two references on terrorism; if the article isn't going to list all the citations that show power laws in weird systems, then it shouldn't priviledge a few while ignoring others. So long as we keep the links to major review articles like Newman's up-to-date, we can let the academics keep track of which systems show power laws -- Paresnah 23:38, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Pareto Distribution: reference to Capitalism

The Pareto distribution, for example, the distribution of wealth in capitalist economies

There's no mention of capitalism in the article on the Pareto distribution - the word capitalist seems redundant here since in feudal societies there appears to have been a similar distribution, only more with a higher exponent, and even within Romania, USSR, and most other non-capitalist societies similar distribution of wealth appears to have occured. Any thoughts? (especially from someone who knows more about Pareto distributions!) --Dilaudid 08:10, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I believe you're right, the Pareto distribution of wealth is pretty universal although the exponent may change. Incidentally, although Pareto proposed a pure power law, nowadays people recognise that the income distribution is more like a Lévy distribution.
Incidentally I think that the Pareto distribution article is pretty parochial, in the sense that they consider "Pareto distribution" to refer to power law probability distributions in general. That's very much an economics point of view. It would be better to merge the technical power-law material away from that article into the present one, and rewrite the Pareto distribution article to talk just about income, making reference to Mandelbrot's article on Pareto-Levy law, etc. —WebDrake 23:26, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

A more general relationship would be ${\displaystyle y\sim x^{k}}$ (i.e. ${\displaystyle y}$ "goes like" ${\displaystyle x^{k}}$) rather than assuming a literal equation like the above. e.g. consider the equation ${\displaystyle y=(x-a)^{k}}$ where ${\displaystyle a}$ is constant. WebDrake 22:31, 7 October 2005 (UTC)