TY - GEN
T1 - On skewed distributions and straight lines
T2 - 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2015
AU - Mokryn, Osnat
AU - Reznik, Alexey
PY - 2015/5/18
Y1 - 2015/5/18
N2 - In this paper, we present a hypothesis that power laws are found only in datasets sampled from a static data, in which each and every item has gained its maximal importance and is not in the process of changing it during the sampling period. We motivate our hypothesis by examining languages, and word-ranking distribution as it appears in books, and in the Bible. To demonstrate the validity of our hypothesis, we experiment with the Wikipedia edit collaboration network. We find that the dataset fits a skewed distribution. Next, we identify its dynamic part. We then show that when the modified part is removed from the obtained dataset, the remaining static part exhibits a good fit to a power law distribution.
AB - In this paper, we present a hypothesis that power laws are found only in datasets sampled from a static data, in which each and every item has gained its maximal importance and is not in the process of changing it during the sampling period. We motivate our hypothesis by examining languages, and word-ranking distribution as it appears in books, and in the Bible. To demonstrate the validity of our hypothesis, we experiment with the Wikipedia edit collaboration network. We find that the dataset fits a skewed distribution. Next, we identify its dynamic part. We then show that when the modified part is removed from the obtained dataset, the remaining static part exhibits a good fit to a power law distribution.
KW - Collaboration networks
KW - Dynamic distributions
KW - Power law distribution
KW - Skewed distributions
KW - Trends
KW - Wikipedia
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84968619374&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2740908.2744716
DO - 10.1145/2740908.2744716
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84968619374
T3 - WWW 2015 Companion - Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web
SP - 1089
EP - 1094
BT - WWW 2015 Companion - Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 18 May 2015 through 22 May 2015
ER -