PNAS

Random sampling of skewed distributions implies Taylor's power law of fluctuation scaling [Statistics]

J. E. Cohen, M. Xu.
Taylor’s law (TL), a widely verified quantitative pattern in ecology and other sciences, describes the variance in a species’ population density (or other nonnegative quantity) as a power-law function of the mean density (or other nonnegative quantity): Approximately, variance = a(mean)b, a > 0. Multiple mechanisms have been proposed to...