Statistical Laws in Complex Systems

This book provides a unifying approach to the study of statistical laws, critically evaluating their role in the theoretical understanding of complex systems and the different data-analysis methods used to evaluate them. Statistical laws describe regular patterns observed in diverse scientific domains, ranging from the magnitude of earthquakes (Gutenberg-Richter law) and metabolic rates in organisms (Kleiber's law), to the frequency distribution of words in texts (Zipf's and Herdan-Heaps' laws),