Related papers: Benford-Newcomb Subsequences for Fraud Detection
We prove connections between Zeckendorf decompositions and Benford's law. Recall that if we define the Fibonacci numbers by $F_1 = 1, F_2 = 2$ and $F_{n+1} = F_n + F_{n-1}$, every positive integer can be written uniquely as a sum of…
In many real life situations, it is observed that the first digits (i.e., $1,2,\ldots,9$) of a numerical data-set, which is expressed using decimal system, do not follow a random distribution. Instead, smaller numbers are favoured by nature…
Benford's law states that the occurrence of significant digits in many data sets is not uniform but tends to follow a logarithmic distribution such that the smaller digits appear as first significant digits more frequently than the larger…
We show that the frequency distribution of the first significant digits of the numbers in the data sets generated from a large class of measures of quantum correlations, which are either entanglement measures, or belong to the…
Prime numbers seem to distribute among the natural numbers with no other law than that of chance, however its global distribution presents a quite remarkable smoothness. Such interplay between randomness and regularity has motivated sci-…
A phenomenological law, called Benford's law, states that the occurrence of the first digit, i.e., $1,2,...,9$, of numbers from many real world sources is not uniformly distributed, but instead favors smaller ones according to a logarithmic…
The Prime Numbers are well-known for their paradoxical stand regarding Benford's Law. On one hand they adamantly refuse to obey the law of Benford in the usual sense, namely that of a normal density of the proportion of primes with d as the…
This article provides a brief overview on a range of basic dynamical systems that conform to the logarithmic distribution of significant digits known as Benford's law. As presented here, most theorems are special cases of known, more…
The renowned proverb, Numbers do not lie, underscores the reliability and insight that lie beneath numbers, a concept of undisputed importance, especially in economics and finance etc. Despite the prosperity of Benford's Law in the first…
Researchers have observed that the frequencies of leading digits in many man-made and naturally occurring datasets follow a logarithmic curve, with digits that start with the number 1 accounting for $\sim 30\%$ of all numbers in the dataset…
Benford's law is an empirical observation, first reported by Simon Newcomb in 1881 and then independently by Frank Benford in 1938: the first significant digits of numbers in large data are often distributed according to a logarithmically…
Kossovsky recently conjectured that the distribution of leading digits of a chain of probability distributions converges to Benford's law as the length of the chain grows. We prove his conjecture in many cases, and provide an interpretation…
The Newcomb-Benford probability distribution is becoming very popular in many areas using statistics, notably in fraud detection. In such contexts, it is important to be able to determine if a data set arises from this distribution while…
We provide general expressions for the joint distributions of the $k$ most significant $b$-ary digits and of the $k$ leading continued fraction coefficients of outcomes of an arbitrary continuous random variable. Our analysis highlights the…
A simple and quick general test to screen for numerical anomalies is presented. It can be applied, for example, to electoral processes, both electronic and manual. It uses vote counts in officially published voting units, which are…
The occurrence of digits one through nine as the leftmost nonzero digit of numbers from real world sources is often not uniformly distributed, but instead, is distributed according to a logarithmic law, known as Benford's law. Here, we…
We develop two complementary generative mechanisms that explain when and why Benford's first-digit law arises. First, a probabilistic Turing machine (PTM) ensemble induces a geometric law for codelength. Maximizing its entropy under a…
Considering the first significant digits (noted d) in data sets of dissipation for turbulent flows, the probability to find a given number (d=1 or 2 or... 9) would be 1/9 for an uniform distribution. Instead the probability closely follows…
The yearly aggregated tax income data of all, more than 8000, Italian municipalities are analyzed for a period of five years, from 2007 to 2011, to search for conformity or not with Benford's law, a counter-intuitive phenomenon observed in…
We prove that many sequences of positive numbers $(a_n)$ defined by finite linear difference equations $a_{n+k}=c_{k-1}a_{n+k-1}+...+c_0a_n$ with suitable non negative reals coefficients $c_i$ satisfy Bendford's Law on the first digit in…