Applications of Composite Lognormal Distributions

Abstract

The use of a power law distribution to model upper tails is common in many areas, most notably in physics. In this paper, we consider two data sets published in the physics literature. We show that composite lognormal distributions can provide better fits than the power law distribution even when the former are applied to the full data (as described in the data section) and the latter is applied just to the upper tail of the data.