
Scale-Free Networks Are Rare - pulisse
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03400
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pulisse
From the abstract:

 _A central claim in modern network science is that real-world networks are
typically "scale free," meaning that the fraction of nodes with degree k
follows a power law [...] Across domains, we find that scale-free networks are
rare, with only 4% exhibiting the strongest-possible evidence of scale-free
structure and 52% exhibiting the weakest-possible evidence. Furthermore,
evidence of scale-free structure is not uniformly distributed across sources:
social networks are at best weakly scale free, while a handful of
technological and biological networks can be called strongly scale free. These
results undermine the universality of scale-free networks and reveal that
real-world networks exhibit a rich structural diversity that will likely
require new ideas and mechanisms to explain._

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PaulHoule
I was involved in that kind of research in the 1990s and it was clear to me at
the time that the people doing that kind of research didn't even know what an
"estimator" was and didn't care to know.

