THE SIZE DISTRIBUTION OF CITIES AND TOWNS IN THE STATES OF INDIA (1951-2011) : AN EVALUATION OF PARETO, LOGNORMAL ANDq-EXPONENTIAL DISTRD3UTIONS

摘要

This paper analyses three statistical distributions used to describe city size distributions: Pareto, three Parameter lognormal and q-Exponential. We have used un-truncated city size data for cities and towns in India for the period 1951 -2011. The parameters of these distributions are computed using maximum likelihood method of estimation. Akaike Information Criterion and Bayesian Information are used to evaluate the fitness of the three distributions and the result show that the distribution, whichfits best the data is q-Exponential. In all the data sets considered, the q-Exponential distribution outperforms the fits of Pareto and the three Parameter lognormal distributions.