Dogs and fat tails

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I was reading a blog post on boat names because it was on Hacker News this morning. The post contained a link to a data set on dog names in NYC and I poked around the data a little. The top names were not at all what I expected, but then again this is limited to NYC; it’s not a sample across the US. These were the top 10 names:

Bella

Luna

Max

Charlie

Coco

Lola

Rocky

Milo

Teddy

Lucy

I wondered if the name frequencies might fit a power-law distribution. They do not, but they follow a log-normal distribution remarkably well.

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John D. Cook, PhD

My colleagues and I have decades of consulting experience helping companies solve complex problems involving data privacy, applied math, and statistics.

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