title: Universality of Zipf's law.
abstract: Zipf's law is the most common statistical distribution displaying scaling behavior. Cities, populations or firms are just examples of this seemingly universal law. Although many different models have been proposed, no general theoretical explanation has been shown to exist for its universality. Here, we show that Zipf's law is, in fact, an inevitable outcome of a very general class of stochastic systems. Borrowing concepts from Algorithmic Information Theory, our derivation is based on the properties of the symbolic sequence obtained through successive observations over a system with an ubounded number of possible states. Specifically, we assume that the complexity of the description of the system provided by the sequence of observations is the one expected for a system evolving to a stable state between order and disorder. This result is obtained from a small set of mild, physically relevant assumptions. The general nature of our derivation and its model-free basis would explain the ubiquity of such a law in real systems.
authors.affiliation: ICREA-Complex Systems Lab, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona Dr, Aiguader 80, 08003 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Bernat
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Corominas-Murtra
authors.forename: Ricard V
authors.initials: RV
authors.lastname: Solé
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical