Accuracy analysis of measurements on a stable power-law distributed series of events

We investigate how finite measurement time limits the accuracy with which the parameters of a stably distributed random series of events can be determined. The model process is generated by timing the emigration of individuals from a population that is subject to deaths and a particular choice of multiple immigration events. This leads to a scale-free discrete random process where customary measures, such as mean value and variance, do not exist. However, converting the number of events occurring in fixed time intervals to a 1-bit ‘clipped’ process allows the construction of well-behaved statistics that still retain vestiges of the original power-law and fluctuation properties. These statistics include the clipped mean and correlation function, from measurements of which both the power-law index of the distribution of events and the time constant of its fluctuations can be deduced. We report here a theoretical analysis of the accuracy of measurements of the mean of the clipped process. This indicates that, for a fixed experiment time, the error on measurements of the sample mean is minimized by an optimum choice of the number of samples. It is shown furthermore that this choice is sensitive to the power-law index and that the approach to Poisson statistics is dominated by rare events or ‘outliers’. Our results are supported by numerical simulation.