A “power law distribution” refers to a probability distribution of a certain mathematical form. To say a situation is described by a “power law distribution” is equivalent to saying it follows “Zipf’s Law” 1.
A PowerLawDistribution describes “…phenomena where large events are rare, but small ones quite common. For example, there are few large earthquakes but many small ones. There are a few mega-cities, but many small towns. There are few words, such as ‘and’ and ‘the’ that occur very frequently, but many which occur rarely. “ 2.
One mechanism which can explain a PowerLawDistribution is PreferentialAttachment.
[1] Lada A. Adamic. Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a ranking tutorial.
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