A Zipf-preserving, long-range correlated surrogate for written language and other symbolic sequences

Marcelo A. Montemurro, Mirko Degli Esposti, 2026. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications.

Proposes a way to make shuffled versions of a symbol sequence that keep both its word frequencies and its long-range correlations, using fractional Gaussian noise, for written language, DNA and other symbol sequences.

Voynich ManuscriptPreprintdoi: 10.1016/j.physa.2025.131227Checked against the original0

What it's used for here

The bioinformatics and inductive-methods surveys adopt it as a null model that keeps word frequencies and the DFA exponent while scrambling short-range structure.

Cited by on this site 2 records

2 methods surveys

Signal processing, inductive methods

SRC

Cite it

Montemurro, M. A., & Degli Esposti, M. (2026). A Zipf-preserving, long-range correlated surrogate for written language and other symbolic sequences. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2025.131227

@article{montemurro2026zipf,
  author = {Montemurro, Marcelo A. and Degli Esposti, Mirko},
  title = {A Zipf-preserving, long-range correlated surrogate for written language and other symbolic sequences},
  journal = {Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1016/j.physa.2025.131227},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2025.131227}
}

TY  - GEN
TI  - A Zipf-preserving, long-range correlated surrogate for written language and other symbolic sequences
AU  - Montemurro, Marcelo A.
AU  - Degli Esposti, Mirko
PY  - 2026
JO  - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
DO  - 10.1016/j.physa.2025.131227
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2025.131227
ER  -

Montemurro, Marcelo A. and Mirko Degli Esposti. “A Zipf-preserving, long-range correlated surrogate for written language and other symbolic sequences.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications (2026). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2025.131227.