Comment on "Towards a large deviation theory for strongly correlated systems"

I comment on a recent paper by Ruiz and Tsallis [Phys. Lett. A 376 (2012) 2451] claiming to have found a "q-exponential" generalization of the large deviation principle for strongly correlated random variables. I show that the basic scaling results that they find numerically can be reproduced with a simple example involving independent random variables, and are not specifically related to the q-exponential function. In fact, identical scaling results can be obtained with any other power-law deformations of the exponential. Thus their results do not conclusively support their claim of a q-exponential generalization of the large deviation principle. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.