Semiparametric independent model reproduces the empirical Zipf plot.

Each curve shows the probabilities of population activity patterns, P(s), sorted in decreasing order on a log-log plot. To construct the empirical Zipf plot, we directly sampled the frequencies of different patterns from data. To construct model predictions, we used the same procedure but replaced real data with artificial datasets of the same size, generated by drawing the samples from the corresponding model. Error bars are 3 SD (bootstrapped).