News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why isn't everything normally distributed?. Parent comment

Re:Why isn't everything normally distributed? by alimw on Thursday July 20, 2017 @11:41PM (#14817903)
> Power law indicates an exponential distribution

This sounds wrong. One is invariant under scaling, the other under translation.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why isn't everything normally distributed? by srean on Thursday July 20, 2017 @11:55PM (#14817955)
> This sounds wrong.

It is.

However there is a way to make it correct. Your second sentence is spot on the intuition. If you log transform power-law distributed random variable the RV that you get is an exponentially distributed RV.

[ Parent | on HN ]