3 ms·
Minor nitpick about being surprised that a power law shows up: you need to be really careful when you say something follows a power law. The appearance of a nic
by pizza 4y ago
Minor nitpick about being surprised that a power law shows up: you need to be really careful when you say something follows a power law. The appearance of a nice power law may actually be illusion, sometimes, because log-scale tends to 'squash' data with quite a lot of 'pressure'.
That's because it's quite possible to have 2 lines of fit that look like they both very nicely follow a power law, but then once you go from a log-scale plot to linear plot by doing the inverse of the log, ie exponential transform, one of the 2 plots may turn out to be really crappy, actually.
So, if the error bars on the log-scale plot are not in some sense really small (e.g logarithmic in themselves) already to begin with, then, you may actually be committing ~great crimes of statistics~, unknowingly.