When comparing two sequences, a natural approach is to count the number of k-letter words the two sequences have in common. No positional information is used in the count, but it has the virtue that the comparison time is linear with sequence length. For this reason this statistic D(2) and certain transformations of D(2) are used for EST sequence database searches. In this paper we begin the ri...

This paper surveys selected applications of the Lorenz curve and related stochastic orders in economics and econometrics, with a bias towards problems in statistical distribution theory. These include characterizations of income distributions in terms of families of inequality measures, Lorenz ordering of multiparameter distributions in terms of their parameters, probability inequalities for di...

The textual, big-data literature misses Bentley et al.'s message on distributions; it largely examines the first-order effects of how a single, signature distribution can predict population behaviour, neglecting second-order effects involving distributional shifts, either between signature distributions or within a given signature distribution. Indeed, Bentley et al. themselves under-emphasise ...

Analyses of statistical distributions of body mass, population density, and size and shape of geographic range offer insights into the empirical patterns and causal mechanisms that characterize the allocation of food and space among the diverse species in continental biotas. These analyses also provide evidence of the processes that couple ecological phenomena that occur on disparate spatial an...

We analyze the effect of disorder and notches on crack roughness in two dimensions. Our simulation results based on large system sizes and extensive statistical sampling indicate that the crack surface exhibits a universal local roughness of zeta(loc)=0.71 and is independent of the initial notch size and disorder in breaking thresholds. The global roughness exponent scales as zeta=0.87 and is a...

Metaphors of Computation and Information tended to detract attention from the intrinsic modes of neural system functions, uncontaminated by the observer's role in collection, and interpretation of experimental data. Recognizing the self-referential mode of function, and the propensity for self-organization to critical states requires a fundamentally new orientation, based on Complex System Dyna...

We study the large-scale topological and dynamical properties of real Internet maps at the autonomous system level, collected in a 3-yr time interval. We find that the connectivity structure of the Internet presents statistical distributions settled in a well-defined stationary state. The large-scale properties are characterized by a scale-free topology consistent with previous observations. Co...

Web-based interorganizational workflows need efficient time management. Variations of activity durations and branching distributions on or-split nodes make it necessary that we treat time management in workflows in a probabilistic way. We introduce the notion of duration histograms for capturing the available temporal information about workflow execution, define the necessary operations for com...

We present a simple explanation for the occurrence of power-law tails in statistical distributions by showing that if stochastic processes with exponential growth in expectation are killed (or observed) randomly, the distribution of the killed or observed state exhibits power-law behavior in one or both tails. This simple mechanism can explain power-law tails in the distributions of the sizes o...

We consider the statistical distribution of zeros of random meromorphic functions whose poles are independent random variables. It is demonstrated that correlation functions of these zeros can be computed analytically, and explicit calculations are performed for the two-point correlation function. This problem naturally appears in, e.g., rank-1 perturbation of an integrable Hamiltonian and, in ...