Growth fluctuation in preferential attachment dynamics

Abstract

In the Yule-Simon process, selection of words follows the preferential attachment mechanism, resulting in the power-law growth in the cumulative number of individual word occurrences. This is derived using mean-field approximation, assuming a continuum limit of both the time and number of word occurrences. However, time and word occurrences are inherently discrete in the process, and it is natural to assume that the cumulative number of word occurrences has a certain fluctuation around the average behavior predicted by the mean-field approximation. We derive the exact and approximate forms of the probability distribution of such fluctuation analytically and confirm that those probability distributions are well supported by the numerical experiments.