Analysis of Stochstic Evolution

The dynamics of generalized Lotka-Volterra systems is studied by theoretical techniques and computer simulations. These systems describe the time evolution of the wealth distribution of individuals in a society, as well as of the market values of firms in the stock market. The individual wealths or market values are given by a set of time dependent variables $w_i$, $i=1,...N$. The equations include a stochastic autocatalytic term (representing investments), a drift term (repr...

History-dependent processes are ubiquitous in natural and social systems. Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or their set of possible outcomes, reduces as they age. We demonstrate that these sample-space reducing (SSR) processes necessarily lead to Zipf's law in the rank distributions of their outcomes. We show that by adding noise to SSR processes ...

In this paper one studies the distribution of log-returns (tick-by-tick) in the Lisbon stock market and shows that it is well adjusted by the solution of the equation, {$\frac{dp_{x}}{d| x|}=-\beta_{q^{\prime }}p_{x}^{q^{\prime}}-(\beta_{q}-\beta_{q^{\prime}}) p_{x}^{q}$}, which corresponds to a generalization of the differential equation which has as solution the power-laws that optimise the entropic form $S_{q}=-k \frac{1-\int p_{x}^{q} dx}{1-q}$, base of present non-extens...

We introduce a stochastic model to explain a double power-law distribution which exhibits two different Paretian behaviors in the upper and the lower tail and widely exists in social and economic systems. The model incorporates fitness consideration and noise fluctuation. We find that if the number of variables (e.g. the degree of nodes in complex networks or people's incomes) grows exponentially, normal distributed fitness coupled with exponentially increasing variable is re...

In nature or societies, the power-law is present ubiquitously, and then it is important to investigate the mathematical characteristics of power-laws in the recent era of big data. In this paper we prove the superposition of non-identical stochastic processes with power-laws converges in density to a unique stable distribution. This property can be used to explain the universality of stable laws such that the sums of the logarithmic return of non-identical stock price fluctua...

This paper introduces nonparametric econometric methods that characterize general power law distributions under basic stability conditions. These methods extend the literature on power laws in the social sciences in several directions. First, we show that any stationary distribution in a random growth setting is shaped entirely by two factors - the idiosyncratic volatilities and reversion rates (a measure of cross-sectional mean reversion) for different ranks in the distribut...

Science in the 21st century seems to be governed by novel approaches involving interdisciplinary work, systemic perspectives and complexity theory concepts. These new paradigms force us to leave aside our elder mechanistic approaches and embrace new starting points based on stochasticity, chaoticity, statistics and probability. In this work we review the fundamental ideas of complexity theory and the classic probabilistic models to study complex systems, based on the law of l...

Zipf's power-law distribution is a generic empirical statistical regularity found in many complex systems. However, rather than universality with a single power-law exponent (equal to 1 for Zipf's law), there are many reported deviations that remain unexplained. A recently developed theory finds that the interplay between (i) one of the most universal ingredients, namely stochastic proportional growth, and (ii) birth and death processes, leads to a generic power-law distribut...

Random multiplicative processes $w_t =\lambda_1 \lambda_2 ... \lambda_t$ (with < \lambda_j > 0 ) lead, in the presence of a boundary constraint, to a distribution $P(w_t)$ in the form of a power law $w_t^{-(1+\mu)}$. We provide a simple and physically intuitive derivation of this result based on a random walk analogy and show the following: 1) the result applies to the asymptotic ($t \to \infty$) distribution of $w_t$ and should be distinguished from the central limit theorem...

Fat tailed statistics and power-laws are ubiquitous in many complex systems. Usually the appearance of of a few anomalously successful individuals (bio-species, investors, websites) is interpreted as reflecting some inherent "quality" (fitness, talent, giftedness) as in Darwin's theory of natural selection. Here we adopt the opposite, "neutral", outlook, suggesting that the main factor explaining success is merely luck. The statistics emerging from the neutral birth-death-mut...