Has anyone checked the underlying assumption (that the there’s a power law involved)? My belief was that most long tailed distributions don’t actually follow a power law.
With a power law there's no mean or median starting at t = 0, so this sort of comparison isn't possible given the FOIA request data available. I'd be interested in seeing the data on the tails to see if those are power law distributed.
Edit: I'll do a quick quantitative check. Using data from the CIA's 2018 FOIA report (p. 18): https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/foia-annual-report
Simple track:
Mean: 32.21 days
Median: 12 days (exponential prediction: 22.33 days, 86% error)
Complex track:
Mean: 368.49 days
Median: 306 days (exponential prediction: 255.42 days, 17% error)
Not the best fit but could be worse.