the statistics of urban scaling and their connection to zipf’s law城市扩展的统计信息和连接zipf定律.pdfVIP

The Statistics of Urban Scaling and Their Connection to Zipf’s Law 1 2 ´ 2 Andres Gomez-Lievano *, HyeJin Youn , Luıs M. A. Bettencourt 1 School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America, 2 Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America Abstract Urban scaling relations characterizing how diverse properties of cities vary on average with their population size have recently been shown to be a general quantitative property of many urban systems around the world. However, in previous studies the statistics of urban indicators were not analyzed in detail, raising important questions about the full characterization of urban properties and how scaling relations may emerge in these larger contexts. Here, we build a self- consistent statistical framework that characterizes the joint probability distributions of urban indicators and city population sizes across an urban system. To develop this framework empirically we use one of the most granular and stochastic urban indicators available, specifically measuring homicides in cities of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, three nations with high and fast changing rates of violent crime. We use these data to derive the conditional probability of the number of homicides per year given the population size of a city. To do this we use Bayes’ rule together with the estimated conditional probability of city size given their number of homicides and the distribution of total homicides. We then show that scaling laws emerge as expectation values of these conditional statistics. Knowledge of these distributions implies, in turn, a relationship between scaling and population size distribution exponents that can be used t