Parameter estimation for power-law distributions by maximum likelihood methods

Abstract

Distributions following a power-law are an ubiquitous phenomenon. Methods for determining the exponent of a power-law tail by graphical means are often used in practice but are intrinsically unreliable. Maximum likelihood estimators for the exponent are a mathematically sound alternative to graphical methods.

Supplementary software: http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/users/bauke/Publications/index.html#powerlaws

References in corpus (2)

• Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
• Problems with Fitting to the Power-Law Distribution

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