Power Law and Entropy Analysis of Catastrophic Phenomena

• Type: Another Publication in an International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2013

Authors

machado, jat (Author) Other; pinto, cma (Author) Other; lopes, am (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: Mathematical Problems in Engineering

Vol. 2013

Pages: 1-10

ISSN: 1024-123X

Publisher: Hindawi

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 6 Citations

Scopus - 10 Citations

Scientific classification

FOS: Engineering and technology > Other engineering and technologies

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-002-1HT

DOI: 10.1155/2013/562320

Abstract (EN): Catastrophic events, such as wars and terrorist attacks, tornadoes and hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and landslides, are always accompanied by a large number of casualties. The size distribution of these casualties has separately been shown to follow approximate power law (PL) distributions. In this paper, we analyze the statistical distributions of the number of victims of catastrophic phenomena, in particular, terrorism, and find double PL behavior. This means that the data sets are better approximated by two PLs instead of a single one. We plot the PL parameters, corresponding to several events, and observe an interesting pattern in the charts, where the lines that connect each pair of points defining the double PLs are almost parallel to each other. A complementary data analysis is performed by means of the computation of the entropy. The results reveal relationships hidden in the data that may trigger a future comprehensive explanation of this type of phenomena.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 10