Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Unobserved Variables

Re:Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Un... by generj on Friday December 30, 2016 @12:49AM (#13282805)

Warning: I'm not a statistician, just an economist with some training in it.

My quick understanding of this paper is that lurking variables can cause Zipf's law. If enough variables are controlled for, in some domains Zipf's Law goes away? For example, they included parts of speech for natural language and for some parts of speech Zipf's Law wasn't existent but for others it was.

This makes intuitive sense to me.

They also find a way to estimate how much of a Zipf's Law effect is caused by a particular variable. Seems like a nice test to run in Stata or R.

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Re:Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Un... by kem on Friday December 30, 2016 @10:16AM (#13284715)

Your questions were similar to mine. I perused the article and hope to read it very carefully later today, but I wondered how often you wouldn't expect unobserved variables to be playing some role, especially in observational data. It's an interesting paper, but when I think of rigorous evaluation of its ideas I get a little confused. I'm probably missing something though.

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Re:Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Un... by alok-g on Friday December 30, 2016 @10:23PM (#13289263)

I would appreciate a short and intuitive explanation of it. :-) Thanks.

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