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Big Data and Large Numbers. Interpreting Zipf's Law

Abstract

It turns out that some empirical facts in Big Data are the effects of properties of large numbers. Zipf's law noise is an example of such an artefact. We expose several properties of the power law distributions and of similar distribution that occur when the population is finite and the rank and counts of elements in the population are natural numbers. Consequences in the interpretation of Zipf's law are discussed.

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