Power Law and Entropy Analysis of Catastrophic Phenomena

• Tipo: Outra Publicação em Revista Científica Internacional
• Data: 2013

Autores

machado, jat (Autor) Outra; pinto, cma (Autor) Outra; lopes, am (Autor) FEUP

Revista

Título: Mathematical Problems in Engineering

Vol. 2013

Páginas: 1-10

ISSN: 1024-123X

Editora: Hindawi

Indexação

ISI Web of Knowledge - 6 Citações

Scopus - 10 Citações

Classificação Científica

FOS: Ciências da engenharia e tecnologias > Outras ciências da engenharia e tecnologias

Outras Informações

ID Authenticus: 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.

Idioma: Inglês

Tipo (Avaliação Docente): Científica

Nº de páginas: 10