https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/e2004-00025-4
Correction algorithm for finite sample statistics
1
Charité, Institut für Biochemie, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Monbijoustrasse 2, 10117, Berlin, Germany
2
(CECAM), École Normale Supérieure, 46, Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire, Allée d’Italie, 69007, Lyon, France
* e-mail: thorsten.poeschel@charite.de
Assume in a sample of size M one finds M
i
representatives of species i with 
. The normalized frequency 
, based on the finite sample, may deviate considerably from the true probabilities p
i
. We propose a method to infer rank-ordered true probabilities r
i
from measured frequencies M
i
. We show that the rank-ordered probabilities provide important informations on the system, e.g., the true number of species, the Shannon- and the Renyi-entropies.
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, and Springer-Verlag, 2003
