Tail universalities in rank distributions as an algebraic problem: the beta-like function

Abstract

Although power laws of the Zipf type have been used by many workers to fit rank distributions in different fields like in economy, geophysics, genetics, soft-matter, networks etc., these fits usually fail at the tails. Some distributions have been proposed to solve the problem, but unfortunately they do not fit at the same time both ending tails. We show that many different data in rank laws, like in granular materials, codons, author impact in scientific journal, etc. are very well fitted by a beta-like function. Then we propose that such universality is due to the fact that a system made from many subsystems or choices, imply stretched exponential frequency-rank functions which qualitatively and quantitatively can be fitted with the proposed beta-like function distribution in the limit of many random variables. We prove this by transforming the problem into an algebraic one: finding the rank of successive products of a given set of numbers.

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