Related papers: Benford-Newcomb Subsequences for Fraud Detection

Benford's law is widely used for fraud-detection nowadays. The underlying assumption for using the law is that a "regular" dataset follows the significant digit phenomenon. In this paper, we address the scenario where a shrewd fraudster…

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…

Benford's Law describes the finding that the distribution of leading (or leftmost) digits of innumerable datasets follows a well-defined logarithmic trend, rather than an intuitive uniformity. In practice this means that the most common…

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…

The Newcomb-Benford Law, which is also called the first digit phenomenon, has applications in diverse phenomena ranging from social and computer networks, engineering systems, natural sciences, and accounting. In forensics, it has been used…

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…

In this paper, we will see that the proportion of d as leading digit, d $\in$ 1, 9, in data (obtained thanks to the hereunder developed model) is more likely to follow a law whose probability distribution is determined by a specific upper…

We address the task of identifying anomalous observations by analyzing digits under the lens of Benford's law. Motivated by the crucial objective of providing reliable statistical analysis of customs declarations, we answer one major and…

Benford's law is a famous law in statistics which states that the leading digits of random variables in diverse data sets appear not uniformly from 1 to 9; the probability that d (d=1,...,9) appears as a leading digit is given by…

We discuss a common suspicion about reported financial data, in 10 industrial sectors of the 6 so called "main developing countries" over the time interval [2000-2014]. These data are examined through Benford's law first significant digit…

The invariance of Benford-Newcomb law under base changing is employed to test whether or not some data follow such distribution. Taking into account the Brazilian senate election in 1994, changes in the numerical base were able to evidence…

Benford's law describes a common phenomenon among many naturally occurring data sets and distributions in which the leading digits of the data are distributed with the probability of a first digit of $d$ base $B$ being…

Benford's Law is an empirical law which predicts the frequency of significant digits in databases corresponding to various phenomena, natural or artificial. Although counter intuitive at the first sight, it predicts a higher occurrence of…

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…

The reproducibility of academic research has long been a persistent issue, contradicting one of the fundamental principles of science. What is even more concerning is the increasing number of false claims found in academic manuscripts…

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…

Benford's law is often used as a support to critical decisions related to data quality or the presence of data manipulations or even fraud. However, many authors argue that conventional statistical tests will reject the null of data…

Benford's law is the statement that in many real-world data sets, the probability of having digit \(d\) in base \(B\), where \(1 \leq d \leq B\), as the first digit is \(\log_{B}\left(\tfrac{d+1}{d}\right)\). We sometimes refer to this as…

Nature and our world have a bias! Roughly $30\%$ of the time the number $1$ occurs as the leading digit in many datasets base $10$. This phenomenon is known as Benford's law and it arrises in diverse fields such as the stock market,…

The goal of this note is to show that a widespread claim about Benford's Law, namely, that the range of every Benford distribution spans at least several orders of magnitude, is false. The proof is constructive and concrete examples are…