Today, I read a post about Ziph’s law and Alzheimer’s disease. I liked the post very much and decided to press the “like” button only to discover that I already “liked” this post more than two years ago.
Indeed this is an interesting post.
Introduction
I was fascinated by Zipf’s Law when I came across it on a VSauce video. It is an empirical law that states that the frequency of occurrence of a word in a large text corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in its frequency table. The frequency distribution will resemble a Pareto distribution so that the 2nd word will occur 1/2 times the first, the 3rd word 1/3 times and the nth word 1/n times. The law applies to all languages, even the ones which we do not understand yet. Curious, I decided to test it out on a text corpus of Alzheimer’s patients describing a picture.
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative condition that usually occurs in older people over 65 years old and worsens over time.
AD kills more people than breast and prostate cancer combined.
There is no cure for AD yet, and it…
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Boris Gorelik 