The likely determines the unlikely

Xiaoyong Yan, Petter Minnhagen and Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 456, issue C, 112-119

Abstract: We point out that the functional form describing the frequency of sizes of events in complex systems (e.g. earthquakes, forest fires, bursts of neuronal activity) can be obtained from maximal likelihood inference, which, remarkably, only involve a few available observed measures such as number of events, total event size and extremes. Most importantly, the method is able to predict with high accuracy the frequency of the rare extreme events. To be able to predict the few, often big impact events, from the frequent small events is of course of great general importance. For a data set of wind speed we are able to predict the frequency of gales with good precision. We analyse several examples ranging from the shortest length of a recruit to the number of Chinese characters which occur only once in a text.

Keywords: Complex systems; Frequency distributions; Maximum entropy; Predictions; Real data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:456:y:2016:i:c:p:112-119

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2016.03.027

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