Fitting heavy tailed distributions: the poweRlaw package

TL;DR

The paper introduces the poweRlaw R package, which simplifies fitting, comparing, and visualizing heavy-tailed distributions like power laws, providing a principled approach for researchers across various fields.

Contribution

It presents a new R package that standardizes and improves the process of fitting and analyzing heavy-tailed distributions, addressing previous methodological issues.

Findings

Provides functions for fitting heavy-tailed distributions

Enables comparison and visualization of distributions

Offers a principled approach to power law fitting

Abstract

Over the last few years, the power law distribution has been used as the data generating mechanism in many disparate fields. However, at times the techniques used to fit the power law distribution have been inappropriate. This paper describes the poweRlaw R package, which makes fitting power laws and other heavy-tailed distributions straightforward. This package contains R functions for fitting, comparing and visualising heavy tailed distributions. Overall, it provides a principled approach to power law fitting.