# More recent Zipfian sightings

The debate concerning these models date back almost 40 years, but Zipfian distributions and attempts to explain them contine to arise. For example, many have been struck by language-like properties exhibited by the long sequences of {genetic} codes found in all living species' DNA. That a simple alphabet'' of four nucleic acid BASE-PAIRS (BPs) ({\tt A,C,G,T} in DNA) are broken into three-letter CODONS that mean one of twenty possible words'' corresponding to amino acids has lead many to wonder what we might learn by viewing the genome as a linguistic object [Sereno91] .

Mantegna et al. [Mantegna94] was led to consider the word'' frequency distributions of such words in the DNA corpus.'' Further, they considered differences in the distributions across coding regions of the genome as well as non-coding regions that never are expressed. Their first result is that this sequence data does indeed contain linguistic features,'' especially in the non-coding regions. By Analyzing various genentic corpora (e.g., approximately one million BPs taken from 14 mammalian sequences), they found that, in contrast to what we might expect of completely random sequences, the rank-frequency distribution of six-BP words could be well fit by a (log-log linear) Zipf exponent= -0.28. They conclude: \bq These results are consistent with the possible existence of one (or more than one) structured biological languages present in non-coding DNA sequences. 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Subsequent analysis, however, makes it quite clear that any such interpretations are ill-founded [Bonhoeffer96] . Deviations from fully random sequence behavior can be attributed to two simple characteristics of biological sequence data. First, define $H(n)$ to be the entropy of the distribution of $n$-length nucleotides sequences. Then the redundancy $R(1)$ of length $n=1$ words is: R(n) = 1 - \frac{H(n)}{2n} $R(1)$ then reflects a simple increase with the {\em variance} of the four base pairs; but the fact that the bases occur with much different frequencies is a well-known biolgical fact. Second, very short range correlations between nucleic acids (which are very easy to imagine given the basic three letter genetic code) and the fact that in DNA the most common words are simply combinations of the most probable letters because recombinations events cross over, especially in regions of short repeats like this. There are still interesting questions (e.g., why coding and non-coding regions differ in their nucleic acid frequencies) but does undermine any large scale language-like properties within DNA sequence.

A final, very recent example of how Zipf-like distributions arise is offered by analyses of WWW SURFING behaviors [Huberman98] , and makes this same point (but cf. Section §8.1 for more recent, apparently contradictory data generated from massive AltaVista logs). Consider each page click by a browsing user to be a character, and the amount of time spent by the same user on the same host to be the length of a word.'' Then (surprise!), empirical data capturing the rank-frequency distribution of each WWW surfing ride'' again shows a (log-log linear) Zipfian relationship with slope equal to -1.5, as shown in Figure (figure) .

Huberman et al. also propose a model explaining this empirical data. Assume that the value'' (what we might think of as perceived relevance) $V(L)$ of each page in a browsing sequence of length $L$ goes up or down according to identical, independently distributed (iid) Gaussian random variables $$V(L) = V(L-1) + \epsilon_L$ Using economic reasoning, Huberman et al. then hypothesize: \bq ... an individual will continue to surf until the expected cost of continuing is perceived to be larger than the discounted expected value of the information to be found in the future.... Even if the value of the current page is negative, it may be worthwhile to proceed, because a collection of high value pages may still be found. If the value is sufficiently negative, however, then it no longer worth the risk to continue. \eq If users's browsing behaviors follow a random walk governed by these consideration, Huberman et al. show that the passage times to this cutoff threshold is given by the inverse Dousian distribution: \Pr (L)=\sqrt{\frac{\lambda }{2 \pi L^{3}}} \exp \left[ \frac{-\lambda (L-\mu )^{2}}{2\mu ^{2}L}\right] \label{eq:websurf} where$\mu $is the mean of the random walk length variable$L$,$\mu ^{3}/\lambda $is its variance and$\lambda \$ is a scaling parameter.

FOA © R. K. Belew - 00-09-21