Pareto, Power Laws, and Fat Tails

What they don’t teach you in statistics

Statistics is the bedrock of data science and analytics. It gives us a powerful toolbox to objectively answer complex questions. However, many of our favorite statistical tools become useless when applied to a particular class of data — Power Laws.

In this article, I will provide a beginner-friendly guide to Power Laws and describe 3 major problems with using traditional statistical methods to analyze them.

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data science getting-started power-law statistics