Related papers: Benford's law: A theoretical explanation for base …
This article provides a concise overview of the main mathematical theory of Benford's law in a form accessible to scientists and students who have had first courses in calculus and probability. In particular, one of the main objectives here…
This article presents a concise proof of the famous Benford's law when the distribution has a Riemann integrable probability density function and provides a criterion to judge whether a distribution obeys the law. The proof is intuitive and…
A simple method to derive parametric analytical extensions of Benford's law for first digits of numerical data is proposed. Two generalized Benford distributions are considered, namely the two-sided power Benford distribution and the new…
In the present article Benford's law and Russell's paradox are explained by means of Aspectual Principle
The diverse applications of the Benford law attract investigators working in various fields of physics, biology and sociology. At the same time, the groundings of the Benford law remain obscure. Our paper demonstrates that the Benford law…
It is pointed out that the language of quotient groups and wrapped distributions allows an elementary discussion of Benford's Law, and adds arguments supporting wide-spread observability of this statistics.
Many systems exhibit a digit bias. For example, the first digit base 10 of the Fibonacci numbers, or of $2^n$, equals 1 not 10% or 11% of the time, as one would expect if all digits were equally likely, but about 30% of the time. This…
Benford's law is an empirical ``law'' governing the frequency of leading digits in numerical data sets. Surprisingly, for mathematical sequences the predictions derived from it can be uncannily accurate. For example, among the first billion…
A random variable (r.v.) X is said to follow Benford's law if log(X) is uniform mod 1. Many experimental data sets prove to follow an approximate version of it, and so do many mathematical series and continuous random variables. This…
Many mathematical, man-made and natural systems exhibit a leading-digit bias, where a first digit (base 10) of 1 occurs not 11\% of the time, as one would expect if all digits were equally likely, but rather 30\%. This phenomenon is known…
The probability that a number in many naturally occurring tables of numerical data has first significant digit $d$ is predicted by Benford's Law ${\rm Prob} (d) = \log_{10} (1 + {\displaystyle{1\over d}}), d = 1, 2 >..., 9$. Illustrations…
It is known that increasing powers of a continuous random variable converge in distribution to Benford's law as the exponent approaches infinity. The rate of convergence has been estimated using Fourier analysis, but we present an…
Benford's law predicts the occurrence of the $n^{\mathrm{th}}$ digit of numbers in datasets originating from various sources of the world, ranging from financial data to atomic spectra. It is intriguing that although many features of…
Benford's law states that for many random variables X > 0 its leading digit D = D(X) satisfies approximately the equation P(D = d) = log_{10}(1 + 1/d) for d = 1,2,...,9. This phenomenon follows from another, maybe more intuitive fact,…
It is known that if X is uniformly distributed modulo 1 and Y is an arbitrary random variable independent of X then Y+X is also uniformly distributed modulo 1. We prove a converse for any continuous random variable Y (or a reasonable…
Suppose that in a multiple choice examination the leading digit of the correct options follows Benford's Law, while the the leading digit of the distractors are uniform. Consider a strategy for guessing at answers that selects the option…
This is a detailed survey which mainly presents the Pinkham-Feller way. I added some new points to the first version [V2] and I suppressed "Examples" devoted to Gamma, Fr\'echet and Weibull laws. Theorem 2 is a bit more general (no…
We study the second law in the context of combinatorial processes, focusing on the mechanisms that give rise to irreversible behavior from an underlying deterministic, invertible, and reversible dynamics.
Benford's law is a statistical inference to predict the frequency of significant digits in naturally occurring numerical databases. In such databases this law predicts a higher occurrence of the digit 1 in the most significant place and…
Computing the probability of a formula given the probabilities or weights associated with other formulas is a natural extension of logical inference to the probabilistic setting. Surprisingly, this problem has received little attention in…