PLFIT(1)

💖 PLFIT(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the plfit manual page — part of User Commands, and honestly? she's iconic. we're fitting power-law distributions to empirical data and we're gonna have a good time doing it. no cap. ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

plfit — fits power-law distributions to empirical data 🦋

⭐ SYNOPSIS ⭐

plfit [OPTIONS] [infile ...]

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so here's the vibe: plfit reads data points from each input file you hand it, and fits a power-law distribution to them, one by one, using the method of Clauset, Shalizi and Newman. periodt. 💖

and if you give it no input files at all? it just processes the standard input instead. she's flexible like that. 🫶

now, the tea: this implementation uses the L-BFGS optimization method to find the optimal alpha for a given xmin in the discrete case. slay. but if you're feeling nostalgic and want the legacy brute-force approach that was originally published in that paper, just use the -a switch. iykyk. ✨

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -h — shows this help message 🙈
• -v — shows version information 👑
• -a RANGE — use the legacy brute-force search for the optimal alpha when a discrete power-law distribution is fitted. RANGE must be in MIN:STEP:MAX format, and the default is 1.5:0.01:3.5. 🍓
• -b — brief (but easily parseable) output format 💀
• -c — force continuous fitting even when every sample is an integer 🌈
• -D VALUE — divide each sample in the input data by VALUE, so you can prevent underflows when fitting a discrete power-law distribution 🧚
• -e EPS — try to provide a p-value with a precision of EPS when the p-value is calculated using the exact method. the default is 0.01. 💜
• -f — use finite-size correction ✨
• -m XMIN — use XMIN as the minimum value for x instead of searching for the optimal value 🔥
• -M — print the first four central moments (i.e. mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis) of the input data, to help you assess the shape of the pdf it may have come from 📊
• -p METHOD — use METHOD to calculate the p-value. must be one of skip, approximate or exact. default is skip. 🌸
• -s SEED — use SEED to seed the random number generator 🎲

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one is plfit, from July 2021, and it lives in the PLFIT(1) corner of the manual universe. go fit something gorgeous. mwah. 💖✨💅