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The Power Law Distribution Of Cumulative Coal Production, Andrew Balthrop, Siyu Quan
The Power Law Distribution Of Cumulative Coal Production, Andrew Balthrop, Siyu Quan
Andrew Balthrop
The coal industry is dominated by the largest mines, with 1% of coal mines in the US being responsible for 65% of cumulative production. This provides evidence that cumulative coal production may be well approximated by a
power law, where the amount of production is inversely proportionate to the distributional rank. Maximum likelihood and regression-based procedures estimate the counter-cumulative power law parameter to be less than one,
indicating there is no well-defined mean or variance for cumulative production. Goodness of fit tests indicate the power-law is a better fit to the data than other competing one-parameter distributions. Additionally, the powerlaw …