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If my data follows a normal distribution I can standardize it for a machine learning algorithm, e.g. logistic regression, by subtracting the mean and dividing the result by the standard deviation.

But what should I do with data that is power law/Pareto distributed, e.g. words in a corpus? How should data in this case be standardized? Or should I prefer simple scale normalizatiom?

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Side tip: tree-based ML algorithms does not require transformation at all and most kernel-based ML codes have pretty clever normalization built-in. – mbq Sep 3 '12 at 21:11

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